The ideology of the aesthetic 0631163026

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Free Particulars 13
2 The Law o f the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke 31
3 The Kantian Imaginary 70
4 Schiller and Hegemony 102
5 The World as Artefact: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel 120
6 The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer 153
7 Absolute Ironies: Seren Kierkegaard 173
8 The Marxist Sublime 196
9 True Illusions: Friedrich Nietzsche 234
10 The Name of the Father: Sigmund Freud 262
11 The Politics of Being: Martin Heidegger 288
12 The Marxist Rabbi: Walter Benjamin 316
13 Art after Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno 341
14 From the Polis to Postmodernism 366
Index 418

Citation preview

THE

IDEOLOGY OF THE AESTHETIC

Terry Eagleton

T he Ideology o f the Aesthetic

The Ideology of the Aesthetic Terry Eagleton

BLACKWELL

© 1990 by Terry Eagleton 350 Main Street, M alden. MA 02148-5020, USA 108 C ow ley Road, O xford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Sw an ston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right o f Terry Eagleton to be identified a s the A uthor o f this Work has been asserted in accordance with the U K Copyright, D esign s, and Patents Act 1988. All righ ts reserved. N o part of this publication m ay be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system , or transm itted, in any form or by any m eans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except a s perm itted by the U K Copyright, D esign s, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior perm ission o f the publisher. First published 1990 by Blackwell Publishing LtdReprinted 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994,1995,1996,1997 (twice), 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004 Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eagleton, Terry, 1943T h e ideology o f the aesthetic/Terry Eagleton. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-16302-6 (pbk.) 1. Aesthetics, M odem . I. Title. BH 151.E2 111 \85'0903-dc20 89-35824 CIP A catalogu e record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt Ehrhardt by H op e Services (Abingdon) Ltd Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Athenaeum Press Ltd, G ateshead, Tyne fic Wear For further inform ation on Blackw ell Publishing, visit our website: http://w w w .blackw ellpublishing.com

Contents Introduction 1 Free Particulars 2 T h e L aw o f the H eart: Shaftesbury, H um e, Burke 3 T h e Kantian Imaginary 4 Schiller and Hegem ony 5 T h e W orld as Artefact: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel 6 T h e D eath o f D esire: Arthur Schopenhauer 7 Absolute Ironies: Seren Kierkegaard 8 T h e M arxist Sublim e 9 T ru e Illusions: Friedrich Nietzsche 10 T h e N am e o f the Father: Sigm und Freud

1 13 31 70 102 120 153 173 196 234 262

11 T h e Politics o f Being: M artin H eidegger

288

12 T h e M arxist Rabbi: Walter Benjamin 13 Art after Auschwitz: T heodor Adorno 14 From the Polis to Postmodernism Index

316 341 366 418

For Toril

The Ideology of the Aesthetic

Introduction T h is is not a history o f aesthetics. T h ere are many important aestheticians whom I pass over in silence in this book, and even in the case o f the thinkers I do consider it is not always their most obviously aesthetic texts which attract my attention. T h e book is rather an attem pt to find in the category o f the aesthetic a way o f gaining access to certain central questions o f m odem European thought - to light up, from that particular angle, a range o f wider social, political and ethical issues. Anyone who inspects the history o f European philosophy since the Enlightenment m ust be struck by the curiously high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions. F o r Kant, the aesthetic holds out a prom ise o f reconciliation between N ature and humanity. Hegel grants art a lowly status within his theoretical system, but nevertheless produces an elephantine treatise on it. T h e aesthetic for Kierkegaard m ust yield ground to the higher truths o f ethics and religious faith, but remains a recurrent preoccupation o f his thought. For Schopenhauer and N ietzsche, in sharply contrasting ways, aesthetic experience represents a suprem e form o f value. M arx’s impressively erudite allusions to world literature are matched by F reu d’s modest confession that the poets had said it all before him. In our own century, H eidegger’s esoteric meditations culminate in a kind o f aestheticized ontology, while the legacy o f Western M arxism from L u kacs to Adorno allots to art a theoretical privilege surprising at first glance for a materialist current o f thought.1 In the contemporary debates on modernity, modernism and postm odernism , ‘culture’ would seem a key category for the analysis and understanding o f late capitalist society.

INTRODUCTION

T o claim such a lofty status for aesthetics in modern European thought in general might seem too unqualified a gesture. Almost all o f the thinkers I discuss in this book are in fact Germ an, even if som e o f the concepts I bring to bear upon their work stem from the intellectual milieu o f m odem France. It would seem plausible to argue that the characteristically idealist cast o f Germ an thought has proved a more hospitable medium for aesthetic enquiry than the rationalism o f France or the empiricism o f Britain. Even so, the influence o f this largely G erm an legacy has spread far beyond its own national frontiers, as the so-called English ‘Culture and Society* tradition would attest; and the question o f the strange tenacity o f aesthetic matters in m odem Europe as a whole thus insists upon posing itself. Why, more particularly, should this theoretical persistence o f the aesthetic typify an historical period when cultural practice might be claimed to have lost much o f its traditional social relevance, debased as it is to a branch o f general commodity production? O ne simple but persuasive answer to this question springs from the progressively abstract, technical nature o f m odem European thought. In this rarefied context, art would still appear to speak o f the human and the concrete, providing us with a welcome respite from the alienating rigours o f other more specialized discourses, and offering, at the very' heart o f this great explosion and division o f knowledges, a residually common world. As far as scientific or sociological questions are concerned, only the expert seem s licensed to speak; when it com es to art, each o f us can hope to contribute our two ha’pence worth. Yet the peculiarity o f aesthetic discourse, as opposed to the languages o f art themselves, is that, while preserving a root in this realm o f everyday experience, it also raises and elaborates such supposedly natural, spontaneous expression to the status o f an intricate intellectual discipline. With the birth o f the aesthetic, then, the sphere o f art itself begins to suffer som ething o f the abstraction and formalization characteristic o f modern theory in general; yet the aesthetic is nevertheless thought to retain a charge o f irreducible particularity, providing us with a kind o f paradigm o f what a nonalienatcd mode o f cognition might look like. Aesthetics is thus always a contradictory', self-undoing sort o f project, which in promoting the theoretical value o f its object risks emptying it o f exactly that specificity’ or inefifability which was thought to rank among its most

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INTRODUCTION

precious features. T h e very language which elevates art offers perpetually to undermine it. I f the aesthetic has played such a dominant role in m odem thought, it is no doubt in part because o f the versatility o f the concept. F o r a notion which is supposed to signify a kind o f functionlessness, few ideas can have served so many disparate functions. Som e readers will doubtless find my use o f the category inadmissibly loose and broad, not least when it comes at times to m erge into the idea o f bodily experience as such. But if the aesthetic returns with such persistence, it is partly because o f a certain indeterminacy o f definition which allows it to figure in a varied span o f preoccupations: freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality, along with several others. My argument, broadly speaking, is that the category o f the aesthetic assum es the im portance it does in m odem Europe because in speaking o f art it speaks o f these other matters too, which are at the heart o f the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony. T h e construction o f the m odem notion o f the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction o f the dominant ideological forms o f m odem classsociety, and indeed from a whole new form o f human subjectivity appropriate to that social order. It is on this account, rather than because men and women have suddenly awoken to the suprem e value o f painting or poetry', that aesthetics plays so obtrusive a role in the intellectual heritage o f the present. But my argument is also that the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological form s, and is in this sense an eminendy contradictory phenomenon. In charting any intellectual current, it is always difficult to know how far back to go. I do not claim that, as far as discourses o f art are concerned, something entirely novel sprang into being in the m id­ eighteenth century. Several o f the aesthetic motifs 1 trace could be pursued back to the Renaissance or even to classical antiquity; and little o f what is said o f self-realization as a goal in itself would have been unfamiliar to Aristotle. T here is no theoretical cataclysm at the centre o f the Enlightenment which throws up a manner o f talking about art utterly devoid o f intellectual antecedents. Whether as rhetoric or poetics, such debates extend back far beyond the earliest historical moment o f this study, which is the writing o f that devoted disciple o f Renaissance neo-Platonism, the Earl o f Shaftesbury'. At

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the sam e time, it belongs to my argument that something new is indeed afoot in the period which this work takes as its starting-point. If ideas o f absolute breaks are 'metaphysical’, so also are notions o f wholly unruptured continuity. One o f the aspects o f that novelty has, indeed, already been alluded to - the fact that in this particular epoch o f class-society, with the emergence o f the early bourgeoisie, aesthetic concepts (some o f them o f distinguished historical pedigree) begin to play, however tacidy, an unusually central, intensive part in the constitution o f a dominant ideology. Conceptions o f the unity and integrity o f the work o f art, for example, are commonplaces o f an ‘aesthetic* discourse which stretches back to classical antiquity; but what em erges from such familiar notions in the late eighteenth century is the curious idea o f the work o f art as a kind o f subject. It is, to be sure, a peculiar kind o f subject, this newly defined artefact, but it is a subject nonetheless. And the historical pressures which give rise to such a strange style o f thought, unlike concepts o f aesthetic unity or autonomy in general, by no means extend back to the epoch o f Aristotle. T h is is a M arxist study - at once, it might be claimed, too much and too little so. T o o much so, because the book could be accused at tim es o f straying into a species o f ieft-functionalism ’ which reduces the internal complexity o f the aesthetic to a direct set o f ideological functions. It is true that for a certain kind o f contemporary critic, any historical or ideological contextualization o f art whatsoever is ipsofacto reductionist; the only difference between such critics and old-style formalists is that while the latter candidly acknowledged this prejudice, elevated it indeed to a whole elaborate theory o f art in itself, the former tend to be a little more elusive. It is not, they feel, that the relation between art and history need be in principle a reductive one; it is just that somehow, in all actual manifestations o f it, it always is. I do not really intend to suggest that the eighteenthcentury bourgeoisie assem bled around a table over their claret to dream up the concept o f the aesthetic as a solution to their political dilem m as, and the political contradictoriness o f the category is itself testimony to the mistakenness o f such a viewpoint. T h e political left always needs to be on guard against reductionism and conspiracy theories - though as far as the latter are concerned it would be unwise for radicals to wax so subde and sophisticated, become so coy o f

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INTRODUCTION

appearing crude, as to forget that certain theoretical concepts are indeed from time to time put to the u ses o f political power, and som etim es in quite direct ways. I f it may seem forcing the issue somewhat to discern relations between the turn to the aesthetic in the Enlightenment and certain problems o f abso lutist political power, one h as only to read Friedrich Schiller to find such relations explicitly formulated, no doubt to the embarrassment o f those ‘anti-reductionists* who might have wished him to be somewhat more discreet about the matter. I f the study is, on the other hand, too little M arxist, it is because a satisfactory historical materialist account o f the work o f any one o f the writers with which it deals, placing their thought in the context o f the material development, forms o f state power and balance o f class forces o f their historical moments, would have required a volume to itself. In the current left triptych o f concerns with class, race and gender, it is som etim es felt that an excessive em phasis on the first o f these categories is in danger o f dominating and distorting enquiry' into the other two, which are at present somewhat less securely established in the left theoretical canon and thus vulnerable to appropriation by a narrowly conceived class politics. It would be foolish for those primarily concerned with political emancipation in the spheres o f race and gender to relax their vigilance in this respect - to accept the mere good intentions or bleeding-heart liberalism o f those white male radicals who, products as they are o f a political history which has often violently marginalized these issues, cannot now be trusted to have miraculously voided such bad habits from their systems overnight. At the sam e time, it is difficult not to feel, in surveying certain quarters o f the left political scene in Europe and above all in the U S A , that the complaint that socialist discourse now universally overshadows these alternative political projects is not only increasingly im plausible but, in som e contexts at least, darkly ironic. T h e truth is that a combination o f factors has contributed in many areas o f con­ temporary left-wing thought to the open or surreptitious denigration o f such questions as social class, historical m odes o f production and form s o f state power, in the name o f a commitment to more ‘topical’ m odes o f political struggle. Paramount am ong these factors has been the newly aggressive turn to the political right o f several Western bourgeois regimes, under pressure o f global capitalist crisis - a dram atic shift in the political spectrum and ideological climate which

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INTRODUCTION

has succeeded in muting and demoralizing many o f those who earlier spoke up more combatively and confidently for a revolutionary politics. T here has been in this respect what one can only characterize as a pervasive failure o f political nerve, and in some cases an accelerating, sometimes squalid process o f accommodation by sectors o f the left to the priorities o f a capitalist politics. In such a context, where certain long-term forms o f emancipatory politics appear either intractable or implausible, it is understandable that some on the political left should turn more readily and hopefully to alternative kinds o f issues where more immediate gains might seem possible issues which a narrowly class-based politics has too often demeaned, travestied and excluded. T o claim that this attention to non-class styles o f politics is in part a response, consciously or not, to the current difficulties o f more traditional political aspirations is in no sense to undervalue the intrinsic importance o f these alternative movements. Any project o f socialist transformation which hoped to succeed without an alliance with such currents which fully respected their autonomy would deliver no more than a hollow mockery' o f human emancipation. It is rather to remind ourselves that, just as a socialist strategy which left unaffected those oppressed in their race or gender would be resoundingly empty, so these particular form s o f oppression can themselves only be finally undone in the context o f an end to capitalist social relations. T h e former point is nowadays often enough em phasized; the latter is in some danger o f being obscured. T he paucity o f socialist thought in the U SA in particular - in the society, that is to say, where much emancipatory cultural theory has been elaborated - has gravely intensified this more general difficulty. O f the left triptych o f preoccupations, it has undoubtedly been social class which has been in such quarters the subject o f the m ost polite, perfunctory hat-tipping, as the feeble American concept o f ‘classism ’ bears witness. But the problem is a pressing one in Europe too. We have now produced a generation o f left-inclined theorists and students who, for reasons for which they are in no sense culpable, have often little political memory' or socialist education. Little political memory, in the sense that a post-Vietnam generation o f radicals has often not much o f radical political substance to remember within the confines o f the W est; little socialist education, in that the last thing that can now be taken for granted is a close familiarity with the

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INTRODUCTION

complex history o f international socialism and its attendant theoretical debates. We live within societies whose aim is not simply to combat radical ideas - that one would readily expect - but to wipe them from living memory: to bring about an am nesiac condition in which it would be as though such notions had never existed, placing them beyond our very powers o f conception. In such a situation, it is vital that the more recently prominent forms o f political engagement should not be allowed to erase, distort or overshadow the rich legacies o f the international socialist movement. I write as one bom into and brought up within a working-class socialist tradition, one who has been reasonably active in such politics since adolescence, and who believes that any form o f political radicalism today which attempts to by-pass that lineage is bound to be impoverished. T here are now, predominantly in the U S A but also in many areas o f Europe, those w hose undoubted radicalism on particular political issues co-exists with an insouciance and ignorance o f socialist struggle typical o f any m iddle-class suburbanite; and I do not believe that socialist men and women should acquiesce in this indifference for fear o f being thought sectarian or unfashionable. T h e re is a reladon between these issues and the fact that one constant theme o f this book concerns the body. Indeed I am half inclined to apologize for the m odishness o f this topic: few literary texts are likely to make it nowadays into the new historicist canon unless they contain at least one mutilated body. A recovery o f the importance o f the body has been one o f the m ost precious achievements o f recent radical thought, and I hope that this book may be seen as extending that fertile line o f enquiry in a new direction. At the sam e time, it is difficult to read the later Roland Barthes, or even the later M ichel Foucault, without feeling that a certain style o f meditation on the body, on pleasures and surfaces, zones and techniques, has acted among other things as a convenient displacement o f a less immediately corporeal politics, and acted also as an ersatz kind o f ethics. T h ere is a privileged, privatized hedonism about such discourse, emerging as it does at just the historical point where certain less exotic forms o f politics found themselves suffering a setback. I try in this book, then, to reunite the idea o f the body with m ore traditional political topics o f the state, class conflict and m odes o f production, through the mediatory' category o f the aesthetic; and to this extent the study distances itself equally from a class politics which

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h as little o f significance to say o f the body, and from a post-class politics which takes refuge from such rebarbatively ‘global’ matters in the body’s intensities. In writing this book, I am clearly concerned to argue against those critics for whom any linkage o f aesthetics and political ideologies m ust appear scandalous or merely bemusing. But I must confess that I also have in my sights those on the political left for whom the aesthetic is simply ‘bourgeois ideology’, to be worsted and ousted by alternative forms o f cultural politics. T h e aesthetic is indeed, as I hope to show, a bourgeois concept in the m ost literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the Enlightenment; but only for the drastically undialectical thought o f a vulgar M arxist or ‘post-M arxist’ trend o f thought could this fact cue an automatic condemnation. It is left moralism, not historical materialism, which having established the bourgeois provenance o f a particular concept, practice or institution, then disowns it in an access o f ideological purity. From the Communist Manifesto onwards, M arxism has never ceased to sing the praises o f the bourgeoisie - to cherish and recollect that in its great revolutionary’ heritage from which radicals must either enduringly learn, or face the prospect o f a closed, illiberal socialist order in the future. T h o se who have now been correctly programmed to reach for their decentred subjectivities at the very mention o f the dread phrase ‘liberal humanist’ repressively disavow the very history which constitutes them, which is by no m eans uniformly negative or oppressive. We forget at our political peril the heroic snuggles o f earlier ‘liberal humanists* against the brutal autocracies o f feudalist absolutism . I f we can and must be severe critics o f Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so. H ere, as always, the most intractable process o f emancipation is that which involves freeing ourselves from ourselves. One o f the tasks o f radical critique, as M arx, Brecht and Walter Benjamin understood, is to salvage and redeem for left political uses whatever is still viable and valuable in the class legacies to which we are heirs. ‘U se what you can’ is a sound enough Brechtian slogan - with, o f course, the implicit corollary that what turns out to be unusable in such traditions should be jettisoned without nostalgia. It is the contradictoriness o f the aesthetic which, I would claim, only a dialectical thought o f this kind can adequately cncom pass. T he emergence o f the aesthetic as a theoretical category is closely bound

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up with the material process by which cultural production, at an early stage o f bourgeois society, becomes ‘autonomous* - autonomous, that is, o f the various social functions which it has traditionally served. O nce artefacts become commodities in the market place, they exist for nothing and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for them­ selves. It is this notion o f autonomy or self-referentiality which the new discourse o f aesthetics is centrally concerned to elaborate; and it is clear enough, from a radical political viewpoint, just how disabling any such idea o f aesthetic autonomy m ust be. It is not only, as radical thought has familiarly insisted, that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values o f competitiveness, exploitation and m aterial possessiveness. It is also, rather more subdy, that the idea o f autonomy - o f a mode o f being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determ ining - provides the middle class with just the ideological m odel o f subjectivity it requires for its material operations. Yet this concept o f autonomy is radically double-edged: if on the one hand it provides a central constituent o f bourgeois ideology, it also marks an em phasis on the self-determining nature o f human powers and capacities which becom es, in the work o f K arl M arx and others, the anthropological foundation o f a revolutionary opposition to bourgeois utility. T h e aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype o f human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision o f human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the im placable enemy o f all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing o f that body with a subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form o f universalism. I f it offers a generous utopian image o f reconciliation between men and women at present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account o f this am phibious concept which either uncritically celebrates or un­ equivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity. An example o f such one-sidedness can be found, among other places, in the later work o f Paul de M an, between which and my own

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enquiries I am glad to observe a certain unexpected convergence.2 D e M an ’s later writing represents a bracing, deeply intricate demystification o f the idea o f the aesthetic which, it could be claimed, w as present in his thought throughout; and there is much that he has to say on this score with which I find m yself in entire agreement. F o r de M an, aesthetic ideology involves a phenomenalist reduction o f the linguistic to the sensuously empirical, a confusing o f mind and world, sign and thing, cognition and percept, which is consecrated in the H egelian symbol and resisted by K ant’s rigorous demarcation o f aesthetic judgem ent from the cognitive, ethical and political realms. S u ch aesthetic ideology', by repressing the contingent, aporetic relation which holds between the spheres o f language and the real, naturalizes or phenomenalizes the former, and is thus in danger o f converting the accidents o f meaning to organic natural process in the characteristic manner o f ideological thought. A valuable, resourceful politics is undoubtedly at work here, pace those left-wing critics for whom de M an is merely an unregenerate ‘formalist*. But it is a politics bought at an enormous cost. In what one might see as an excessive reaction to his own earlier involvements with organicist ideologies o f an extreme right-wing kind, d e M an is led to suppress the potentially positive dimensions o f the aesthetic in a way which perpetuates, if now in a wholly new style, his earlier hostility to an emancipatory politics. Few critics have been more bleakly unenthused by bodiliness - by the whole prospect o f a creative development o f the sensuous, creaturely aspects o f human existence, by pleasure, Nature and self-delighting powers, all o f which now figure as insidious aesthetic seductions to be manfully resisted. T h e last critic by whom one can imagine de M an being in the least enchanted is Mikhail Bakhtin. One might question som e o f the assum ptions o f de M an ’s later politics - not least the unwarranted belief that all ideology, without exception, is crucially concerned to ‘naturalize* or organicize social practice. But there is no doubt that de M an is indeed a thoroughly political critic from the outset. It is simply that the consistency' o fth at politics, the figure in the carpet o f his work, lies in an unremitting hostility to the practice o f political emancipation. In this sense Antonio Gram sci was right when, in a remarkable flash o f prescience, he wrote in his Prison Notebooks that ‘It could be asserted that Freud is the last o f the Ideologues, and that de M an is also an “ ideologue” .*3

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INTRODUCTION

T h e re are two major om issions in this work which I should perhaps clarify. T h e first is o f any extensive reference to the British traditions o f aesthetic thought. R eaders will no doubt find a number o f echoes o f that history, o f Coleridge and Matthew Arnold and William M orris, in the mainly Germ an writing I examine; but this particular terrain has been well enough ploughed already, and since much in the Anglophone tradition is in fact derivative o f Germ an philosophy, I have thought it best to have recourse here, so to speak, to the horse’s mouth. T h e other omission, perhaps a m ore irritating one for some readers, is o f any examination o f actual works o f art. T h o se trained in literary critical habits o f thought are usually enamoured o f ‘concrete illustration’; but since I reject the idea that ‘theory’ is acceptable if and only if it perform s the role o f humble handmaiden to the aesthetic work, I have tried to frustrate this expectation as far as possible by rem aining for the most part resolutely silent about particular artefacts. I must admit, however, that I did originally conceive o f the book as a kind o f doubled text, in which an account o f European aesthetic theory would be coupled at every point to a consideration o f the literary culture o f Ireland. T akin g my cue from a passing reference o f K ant to the revolutionary U nited Irishmen, I would have looked at Wolfe T on e and his political colleagues in the context o f the European Enlightenment, and reviewed Irish cultural nationalism from T hom as Davis to Padraic Pearse in the light o f European idealist thought. I also intended to harness somewhat loosely such figures as M arx, Ja m es Connolly and S ean O ’Casey, and to link N ietzsche with Wilde and Yeats, Freud with Joyce, Schopenhauer and Adorno with Sam uel Beckett, and (wilder flights, these) H eidegger with certain aspects o f Joh n Synge and Seam us Heaney. T h e result o f this ambitious project would have been a volume which only readers in regular weight-training would have been able to lift; and I will therefore reserve this work either for a patented board gam e, in which players would be awarded points for producing the m ost fanciful possible connections between European philosophers and Irish writers, or for some future study. 1 hope it will not be thought that I consider the kind o f research em bodied in this book somehow prototypical o f what radical critics should now m ost importantly be doing. An analysis o f K ant’s third Critique or an inspection o f Kierkegaard’s religious meditations are hardly the m ost urgent tasks facing the political left. T here are many

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forms o f radical cultural enquiry o f considerably greater political significance than such high theoretical labour; but a deeper under­ standing o f the mechanisms by which political hegemony is currently maintained is a necessary prerequisite o f effective political action, and this is one kind o f insight which I believe an enquiry into the aesthetic can yield. While such a project is by no means everything, it is not, perhaps, to be sniffed at either. I am not a professional philosopher, as the reader is no doubt just about to discover; and I am therefore deeply grateful to various friends and colleagues more expert in this area than myself, who have read this book in whole or part and offered many valuable criticisms and suggestions. I must thank in particular Joh n Barrell, Jay Bernstein, Andrew Bowie, Howard Caygill, Jerry Cohen, Peter Dews, Jo sep h Fell, Patrick Gardiner, Paul Hamilton, Ken Hirschkop, Toril M oi, Alexander Neham as, Peter Osborne, Stephen Priest, Jacquelin e R ose and Vigdis Songe M öller. Since these individuals charitably or carelessly overlooked my mistakes, they are to that extent partly responsible for them. I am grateful as always to my editors Philip Carpenter and S u e Vice, whose acumen and efficiency remain undiminished since the days o f their student essays. Finally, since I am now taking my leave o f it, I would like to record my gratitude to Wadham College, Oxford, which for almost twenty years has supported and encouraged me in the building o f an English school there true to its own long traditions o f nonconformity and critical dissent.

T.E. Notes 1 See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1979), chapter 4. 2 See in particular Paul de Man, Thenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, in G. Shapiro and A. Sica (eds), Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst, Mass., 1984). 3 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooksy- edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey NowcI!-Sir.ith (London, 1971), p. 376.

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Free Particulars A esthetics is bom as a discourse o f the body. In its original formulation by the Germ an philosopher Alexander Baum garten, the term refers not in the first place to art, but, as the G reek aisthesis would suggest, to the whole region o f human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain o f conceptual thought. T h e distinction which the term ‘aesthetic’ initially enforces in the mid-eighteenth century is not one between ‘art’ and i i f e \ but between the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas, that which is bound up with our creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts som e shadowy existence in the recesses o f the mind. It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. T h at territory is nothing less than the whole o f our sensate life together - the business o f affections and aversions, o f how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, o f that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our m ost banal, biological insertion into the world. T h e aesthetic concerns this m ost gross and palpable dimension o f the human, which post-Cartesian philosophy, in som e curious lapse o f attention, has somehow m anaged to overlook. It is thus the first stirrings o f a primitive m aterialism - o f the body’s long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny o f the theoretical. T h e oversight o f classical philosophy was not without its political cost. F o r how can any political order flourish which does not address itse lf to this m ost tangible area o f the ‘lived’, o f everything that belongs to a society’s somatic, sensational life? How can ‘experience’

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be allowed to fall outside a society’s ruling concepts? Could it be that this realm is impenetrably opaque to reason, eluding its categories as surely as the smell o f thyme or the taste o f potatoes? M ust the life o f the body be given up on, as the sheer unthinkable other o f thought, or are its mysterious ways somehow m appable by intellection in what would then prove a wholly novel science, the science o f sensibility itself? I f the phrase is nothing more than an oxymoron, then the political consequences are surely dire. N othing could be more disabled than a ruling rationality which can know nothing beyond its own concepts, forbidden from enquiring into the very stu ff o f passion and perception. How can the absolute monarch o f Reason retain its legitimacy if what K ant called the ‘rabble’ o f the senses remains forever beyond its ken? D o es not pow er require some ability to anatomize the feelings o f what it subordinates, some science or concrete logic at its disposal which would map from the inside the very structures o f breathing, sentient life? T h e call for an aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germ any is among other things a response to the problem o f political absolutism. Germ any in that period was a parcellized territoiy o f feudal-absolutist stales, marked by a particularism and idiosyncrasy consequent on its lack o f a general culture. Its princes im posed their imperious diktats through elaborate bureaucracies, while a wretchedly exploited peasantry languished in conditions often little better than bestial. Beneath this autocratic sway, an ineffectual bourgeoisie remained cram ped by the nobility’s mercantilist policies o f state-controlled industry and tariff-protected trade, overwhelmed by the conspicuous power o f the courts, alienated from the degraded m asses and bereft o f any corporate influence in national life. T h e Junkerdom , rudely confiscating from the middle class their historic role, themselves sponsored much o f what industrial development there was for their own fiscal or military purposes, leaving a largely quiescent middle class to do business with the state, rather than force the state to shape its policies to their own interests. A pervasive lack o f capital and enterprise, poor communications and locally based trade, guilddominated towns marooned in a backward countryside: such were the unpropitious conditions o f the Germ an bourgeoisie in this parochial, benighted social order. Its professional and intellectual strata, however, were steadily growing, to produce for the first time in the later eighteenth century a professional literary caste; and this group

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showed all the signs o f exerting a cultural and spiritual leadership beyond the reach o f the self-serving aristocracy. Unrooted in political or econom ic power, however, this bourgeois enlightenment remained in many respects enm ortgaged to feudalist absolutism , marked by that profound respect for authority o f which Imm anuel K ant, courageous Aufklärer and docile subject o f the king o f Prussia, may be taken as exemplary. W hat germinates in the eighteenth centuiy as the strange new discourse o f aesthetics is not a challenge to that political authority; but it can be read as symptomatic o f an ideological dilemma inherent in absolutist power. Such power needs for its own purposes to take account o f ‘sensible’ life, for without an understanding o f this no dom inion can be secure. T h e world o f feelings and sensations can surely not just be surrendered to the ‘subjective’, to what K ant scornfully termed the ‘egoism o f taste’; instead, it m ust be brought within the m ajestic scope o f reason itself. I f the Lcbenswclt is not rationally formalizable, have not all the m ost vital ideological issues been consigned to som e limbo beyond on e’s control? Yet how can reason, that m ost immaterial o f faculties, grasp the grossly sensuous? Perhaps what makes things available to empirical knowledge in the first place, their palpable materiality, is also in a devastating irony what banishes them beyond cognition. R eason m ust find som e way o f penetrating the world o f perception, but in doing so m ust not put at risk its own absolute power. It is just this delicate balance which Baum garten’s aesthetics seek to achieve. I f his Aathetica (1750) opens up in an innovative gesture the whole terrain o f sensation, what it opens it up to is in effect the colonization o f reason. F o r Baum garten, aesthetic cognition m ediates between the generalities o f reason and the particulars o f sense: the aesthetic is that realm o f existence which partakes o f the perfection o f reason, but in a ‘confused’ m ode. ‘Confusion’ here m eans not ‘m uddle’ but ‘fusion’: in their organic interpenetration, the elements o f aesthetic representation resist that discrimination into discrete units which is characteristic o f conceptual thought. B u t this does not m ean that such representations are obscure: on the contrary, the m ore ‘confused* they are —the more unity-in-variety they attain - the m ore clear, perfect and determinate they becom e. A poem is in this sen se a perfected form o f sensate discourse. Aesthetic unities are thus open to rational analysis, though they dem and a specialized form or

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idiom o f reason, and this is aesthetics. Aesthetics, Baum garten writes, is the ‘sister’ o f logic, a kind o f ratio inferior or feminine analogue o f reason at the lower level o f sensational life. Its task is to order this dom ain into clear or perfectly determinate representations, in a m anner akin to (if relatively autonomous o f) the operations o f reason proper. Aesthetics is bom o f the recognition that the world o f perception and experience cannot simply be derived from abstract universal laws, but dem ands its own appropriate discourse and displays its own inner, if inferior, logic. As a kind o f concrete thought or sen suous analogue o f the concept, the aesthetic partakes at once o f the rational and the real, suspended between the two somewhat in the m anner o f the Lévi-Straussian myth. It is bom as a woman, subordinate to man but with her o w t* humble, necessary tasks to perform . S u ch a mode o f cognition is o f vital importance if the ruling order is to understand its own history. F o r if sensation is characterized by a com plex individuation which defeats the general concept, so is history itself. Both phenomena are marked by an irreducible particularity or concrete determinateness which threatens to put them beyond the bounds o f abstract thought. ‘Individuals', writes Baumgarten, ‘are determined in every' re sp e c t. . . particular representations are in the highest degree poetic.’ 1 Since history is a question o f ‘individuals’, it is ‘poetic1 in precisely this sense, a matter o f determinate specificities; and it would therefore seem alarmingly to fall outside the com pass o f reason. What if the history o f the ruling class were itself opaque to its knowledge, an unknowable exteriority beyond the pale o f the concept? Aesthetics em erges as a theoretical discourse in response to such dilem m as; it is a kind o f prosthesis to reason, extending a reified Enlightenm ent rationality into vital regions which are otherwise beyond its reach. It can cope, for example, with questions o f desire and rhetorical effectivity: Baum garten describes desire as ‘a sensate representation because a confused representation o f the good’,2 and exam ines the ways in which poetic sense-im pressions can arouse particular emotive effects. T h e aesthetic, then, is simply the name given to that hybrid form o f cognition which can clarify the raw stu ff o f perception and historical practice, disclosing the inner structure o f the concrete. Reason as such pursues its lofty ends far removed from such lowly particulars; but a working replica o f itself known as the aesthetic springs into being as a kind o f cognitive underlabourer, to

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know in its uniqueness all that to which the higher reason is necessarily blind. Because the aesthetic exists, the dense particulars o f perception can be made luminous to thought, and determinate concretions assem bled into historical narrative. ‘Scien ce’, writes Baum garten, ‘is not to be dragged down to the region o f sensibility, bu t the sensible is to be lifted to the dignity o f knowledge.’3Dominion over all inferior powers, he warns, belongs to reason alone; but this dominion m ust never degenerate into tyranny. It m ust rather assum e the form o f what we might now, after G ram sci, term ‘hegemony’, ruling and informing the sen ses from within while allowing them to thrive in all o f their relative autonomy. O nce in possession o f such a ‘science o f the concrete’ - ‘a contradiction in term s’, Schopenhauer was later to call it - there is no need to fear that history and the body will slip through the net o f conceptual discourse to leave one grasping at empty space. Within the dense welter o f our material life, with all its amorphous flux, certain objects stand out in a sort o f perfection dimly akin to reason, and these are known as the beautiful. A kind o f ideality seem s to inform their sensuous existence from within, rather than floating above it in som e Platonic space; so that a rigorous logic is here revealed to us in m atter itself, felt instantly on the pulses. Because these are objects which we can agree to be beautiful, not by arguing or analysing but ju st by looking and seeing, a spontaneous consensus is brought to birth within our creaturely life, bringing with it the prom ise that such a life, for all its apparent arbitrariness and obscurity, might indeed work in som e sense very like a rational law. Such , as we shall see, is som ething o f the meaning o f the aesthetic for K ant, who will look to it for an elusive third way between the vagaries o f subjective feeling and the bloodless rigour o f the understanding. F o r a m odem parallel to this meaning o f the aesthetic, we might look less to Benedetto Croce than to the later Edm und H usserl. For H u sserl’s purpose in The Crisis o f European Sciences is precisely to rescue the life-world from its troubling opacity to reason, thereby renewing an Occidental rationality which has cut alarmingly adrift from its som atic, perceptual roots. Philosophy cannot fulfil its role as the universal, ultimately grounding science if it abandons the life-world to its anonymity; it m ust remember that the body, even before it has

com e to think, is always a sensibly experiencing organism positioned in its world in a way quite distinct from the placing o f an object in a

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box. Scientific knowledge o f an objective reality is always already grounded in this intuitive pre-givenness o f things to the vulnerably perceptive body, in the primordial physicality o f our being-in-theworld. We scientists, H usserl remarks with faint surprise, are after all human beings; and it is because a m isguided rationalism has overlooked this fact that European culture is in the crisis it is. (H usserl, victim o f fascism , is writing in the 1930s.) Thought must thus round upon itself, retrieving the Lebenswclt from whose murky depths it springs, in a new ‘universal science o f subjectivity*. Such a science, however, is not in fact new in the least: when H usserl adm onishes us that we must ‘consider the surrounding life-world concretely, in its neglected relativity . . . the world in which we live intuitively, together with its real entities’,4 he is speaking, in the original sense o f the term, as an aesthetkian. It is not, o f course, a question o f surrendering ourselves to ‘this whole merely subjective and apparently incomprehensible “ Heraclitean flux” *5 which is our daily experience, but rather o f rigorously formalizing it. F o r the lifeworld exhibits a general structure, and this structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. ‘We can attend to it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all.’6 Indeed it turns out conveniently enough that the life-world discloses just the same structures that scientific thought presupposes in its construction o f an objective reality. H igher and lower styles o f reasoning, in Baumgartenian term s, manifest a common form. Even so, the project o f formalizing the life-world is not a simple one, and H usserl is frank enough to confess that ‘one is soon beset by extraordinary difficulties . . . every “ ground” that is reached points to further grounds, every horizon opened up awakens new horizons’.7 Pausing to console us with the thought that this ‘endless whole, in its infinity o f flowing movement, is oriented toward the unity o f one meaning’, H usserl brutally undoes this solace in the next breath by denying that this is true ‘in such a way that we could ever simply grasp and understand the whole’.8 Like K afk a’s hope, it would appear that there is plenty o f totality, but not for us. T h e project o f formalizing the life-world would seem to scupper itself before getting o ff the ground, and with it the proper grounding o f reason. It will be left to M aurice M erleau-Ponty to develop this ‘return to living history and the spoken word’ - but in doing so to question the assum ption that this is simply ‘a preparatory

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step which should be followed by the properly philosophical task o f universal constitution’.9 From Baum garten to phenomenology, it is a question o f reason deviating, doubling back on itself, taking a detour through sensation, experience, ‘naivety’ a s H usserl calls it in the Vienna lecture, so that it will not have to suffer the em barrassm ent o f arriving at its telos empty-handed, big with wisdom but deaf, dumb and blind into the bargain. W e shall see a little later, especially in the work o f Friedrich Schiller, how such a detour through sensation is politically necessary. I f absolutism does not wish to trigger rebellion, it m ust make generous accom m odation for sensual inclination. Yet this turn to the affective subject is not without its perils for an absolutist law. I f it may succeed in inscribing that law all the m ore effectively on the hearts and bodies o f those it subjugates, it may also, by a self-deconstructive logic, come to subjectivizc such authority out o f existence, clearing the ground for a new concept o f legality and political power altogether. In a striking historical irony recorded by K arl M arx, the very idealist cast into which conditions o f social backwardness had forced the thinking o f the late eighteenth-century G erm an middle class led to the préfiguration in the mind o f a bold new model o f social life as yet quite unachievable in reality. From the depths o f a benighted late feudal autocracy, a vision could be projected o f a universal order o f free, equal, autonomous human subjects, obeying no laws but those which they gave to themselves. T h is bourgeois public sphere breaks decisively with the privilege and particularism o f the ancien regime, installing the middle class, in im age if not in reality, as a truly universal subject, and com pensating with the grandeur o f this dream for its politically’ supine status. What is at stake here is nothing less than the production o f an entirely new kind o f human subject - one which, like the work o f art itself, discovers the law in the depths o f its own free identity, rather than in som e oppressive external power. T h e liberated subject is the one who has appropriated the law as the very principle o f its own autonomy, broken the forbidding tablets o f stone on which that law was originally inscribed in order to rewrite it on the heart o f flesh. T o consent to the law is thus to consent to one’s own inward being. ‘T h e heart*, writes R ousseau in Émile, ‘only receives laws from itself; by wanting to enchain it one releases it; one only enchains it by leaving it free.’ 10 Antonio G ram sci will write later in the Prison Notebooks o f a form o f

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civil society ‘in which the individual can govern him self without his self-governm ent thereby entering into conflict with political society - but rather becoming its normal continuation, its organic com plem ent’.11 In a classic moment in The Social Contract, Rousseau speaks o f the m ost important form o f law a s one ‘which is not graven on tablets o f marble or brass, but on the hearts o f the citizens. T h is form s the real constitution o f the State, takes on eveiy day new powers, when other laws decay or die out, restores them or takes their place, keeps a people in the ways it was meant to go, and insensibly replaces authority by the force o f habit. I am speaking o f morality, o f custom , above all o f public opinion; a power unknown to political thinkers, on which nonetheless success in everything else depends.*12 T h e ultimate binding force o f the bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus o f absolutism , will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that pow er in such an order has become acstheticizcd. it is at one with the body’s spontaneous im pulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae o f subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed. T o dissolve the law to custom, to sheer unthinking habit, is to identify it with the human subject’s own pleasurable well-being, so that to transgress that law would signify a deep self-violation. T h e new subject, which bestows on itself self-referentially a law at one with its im m ediate experience, finding its freedom in its necessity, is m odelled on the aesthetic artefact. T h is centrality o f custom, as opposed to som e naked reason, lies at the root o f H egel’s critique o f Kantian morality. K ant’s practical reason, with its uncompromising appeal to abstract duty as an end in itself, sm acks rather too much o f the absolutism o f feudalist power. T h e aesthetic theory o f the Critique o f Judgement suggests, by contrast, a resolute turn to the subject: K an t retains the idea o f a universal law, bu t now discovers this law at work in the very structure o f our subjective capacities. T h is ‘lawfulness without a law’ signifies a deft com prom ise between mere subjectivism on the one hand, and an excessively abstract reason on the other. T h e re is indeed for K ant a kind o f ‘law’ at work in aesthetic judgem ent, but one which seem s inseparable from the very particularity o f the artefact. As such, K an t’s ‘lawfulness without a law* offers a parallel to that ‘authority which is

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not an authority* (The Social Contract) which R ousseau finds in the structure o f the ideal political state. In both cases, a universal law o f a kind lives wholly in its free, individual incarnations, whether these are political subjects or the elements o f the aesthetic artefact. T h e law sim ply is an assem bly o f autonom ous, self-governing particulars working in spontaneous reciprocal harmony. Yet K an t’s turn to the subject is hardly a turn to the body, whose needs and desires fall outside the disinterestedness o f aesthetic taste. T h e body cannot be figured or represented within the frame o f Kantian aesthetics; and K a n t ends up accordingly with a formalistic ethics, an abstract theory o f political rights, and a ‘subjective’ but non-sensuous aesthetics. It is all o f these which H egel’s more capacious notion o f reason seeks to sweep up and transform. H egel rejects K ant’s stem opposition between morality and sensuality, defining instead an idea o f reason which will encom pass the cognitive, practical and affective together.13 Hegelian R eason does not only apprehend the good, but so engages and transform s our bodily inclinations as to bring them into spontaneous accord with universal rational precepts. And what m ediates between reason and experience here is the self-realizing praxis o f human subjects in political life. Reason, in short, is not sim ply a contemplative faculty, but a whole project for the hegemonic reconstruction o f subjects - what Seyla Benhabib has called ‘the

successive transformation and reeducation o f inner nature’.14 Reason works out its own mysterious ends through human beings’ sensuous, self-actualizing activity in the realm o f Sittlichkeit (concrete ethical life) or Objective Spirit. Rational moral behaviour is thus inseparable from questions o f human happiness and self-fulfilment; and if this is so then H egel has in som e sense ‘aestheticizcd’ reason by anchoring it in the body’s affections and desires. It is not o f course aestheticized awayy dissolved to som e mere hedonism o r intuitionism; but it has lapsed from the lofty Kantian domain o f Duty to become an active, transfigurative force in material life. T h e ‘aesthetic’ dim ension o f this program m e can best be disclosed by suggesting that what H egel confronts in emergent bourgeois society is a conflict between a ‘bad’ particularism on the one hand, and a ‘ bad* universalism on the other. T h e former is a matter o f civil society: it stem s from the private economic interest o f the solitary citizen, who as H egel comments in the Philosophy o f Right is each his own end and has no regard for others. T h e latter is a question o f

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the political state, where these unequal, antagonistic m onads are deceptively constituted as abstractly free and equivalent. In this sense, bourgeois society is a grotesque travesty o f the aesthetic artefact, which harmoniously interrelates general an d particular, universal and individual, form and content, spirit and sense. In the dialectical m edium o f Sittlichkeit, however, the subject’s participation in universal reason takes the shape at each moment o f a unified, concretely particular form o f life. It is through 4Bildung , the rational education o f desire through praxis, or as we might say a program m e o f spiritual hegemony, that the bond between individual and universal is ceaselessly constituted. Know ledge, moral practice and pleasurable self-fulfilm ent are thus coupled together in the complex interior unity o f H egelian Reason. T h e ethical, H egel rem arks in the Philosophy o f Right, appears not as law but a s custom , an habitual form o f action which becom es a ‘second nature’. Custom is the law o f the spirit o f freedom ; the project o f education is to show individuals the way to a new birth, converting their ‘first’ nature o f appetites and desires to a second, spiritual one which will then becom e customary to them. N o longer tom asunder between blind individualism and abstract universalism, the reborn subject lives its existence, we might claim, aesthetically, in accordance with a law which is now entirely at one with its spontaneous being. What finally secures social order is that realm o f customary practice and instinctual piety, more supple and resilient than abstract rights, where the living energies and affections o f subjects are invested. T h a t this should be so follows necessarily from the social conditions o f the bourgeoisie. Possessive individualism abandons each subject to its own private space, dissolves all positive bonds between them and thrusts them into m utual antagonism. ‘ By “antagonism ” ’, writes K an t in his ‘Idea for a Universal History’, ‘I m ean the unsociable sociability o f men, i.e. their propensity to enter into society bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society.’ 15 In a striking irony, the very practices which reproduce bourgeois society also threaten to under­ m ine i t I f no positive social bonds are possible at the level o f material production or ‘civil society’, one might perhaps look to the political arena o f the state to bear the burden o f such interrelationship. What on e finds here, however, is a merely notional community o f abstractly symmetrical subjects, too rarefied and theoretic to provide a rich

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experience o f consensuality. Once the bourgeoisie has dismantled the centralizing political apparatus o f absolutism , either in fantasy or reality, it finds itself bereft o f som e o f the institutions which had previously organized social life as a whole. T h e question therefore arises as to where it is to locate a sense o f unity powerful enough to reproduce itself by. In economic life, individuals are structurally isolated and antagonistic; at the political level there would seem nothing but abstract rights to link one subject to the other. T h is is one reason why the ‘aesthetic* realm o f sentim ents, affections and spontaneous bodily habits comes to assum e the significance it does. C ustom , piety, intuition and opinion must now cohere an otherwise abstract, atomized social order. M oreover, once absolutist power has been overturned, each subject must function as its own seat o f selfgovernment. An erstwhile centralized authority must be parcellized and localized: absolved from continuous political supervision, the bourgeois subject must assum e the burden o f its own internalized governance. T h is is not to suggest that absolutist power itself requires no such internalization: like any successful political authority, it dem ands complicity and collusion from those it subordinates. It is not a question o f som e stark contrast between a purely heteronomous law on the one hand, and an insidiously consensual one on the other. But with the growth o f early bourgeois society, the ratio between coercion and consent is undergoing gradual transformation: only a rule weighted towards the latter can effectively regulate individuals whose econom ic activity necessitates a high degree o f autonomy. It is in this sen se, too, that the aesthetic moves into the foreground in such conditions. Like the work o f art as defined by the discourse o f aesthetics, the bourgeois subject is autonom ous and self-determining, acknowledges no merely extrinsic law but instead, in som e mysterious fashion, gives the law to itself. In doing so, the law becom es the form which shapes into harmonious unity the turbulent content o f the subject’s appetites and inclinations. T h e compulsion o f autocratic pow er is replaced by the more gratifying compulsion o f the subject’s self-identity. T o rely on sentiment as a source o f one’s social cohesion is not as precarious a matter as it looks. T h e bourgeois state, after all, still has its coercive instruments at the ready should this project falter; and what bonds could in any case be stronger, m ore unimpeachable, than those o f the senses, o f ‘natural* compassion and instinctive allegiance?

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S u ch organic liaisons are surely a more trustworthy form o f political rule than the inorganic, oppressive structures o f absolutism . Only when governing imperatives have been dissolved into spontaneous reflex, when human subjects are linked to each other in their very flesh, can a truly corporate existence be fashioned. It is for this reason that the early bourgeoisie is so preoccupied with virtu e- with the lived habit o f m oral propriety, rather than a laborious adherence to some external norm. Su ch a belief naturally dem ands an ambitious program m e o f moral education and reconstruction, for there is no assurance that the human subjects who em erge from the ancien régime will prove refined and enlightened enough for power to found itself on their sensibilities. It is thus that R ousseau writes the Émile and the Nouvelle Heloïse, intervening in the realm s o f pedagogy and sexual morality to construct new forms o f subjectivity. Similarly, the law in The Social Contract has behind it a Legislator, whose role is the hegem onic one o f educating the people to receive the law’s decrees. ‘T h e (Rousseauan) state’, comments Ernst C assirer, ‘does not simply add ress itself to already existing and given subjects o f the will; rather its first aim is to create the sort o f subjects to whom it can address its call.’ 16 N ot just any subject can be ‘interpellated’, in Althusserian ph rase;17 the task o f political hegemony is to produce the very forms o f subjecthood which will form the basis o f political unity. T h e virtue o f R ousseau’s ideal citizen lies in his passionate affection for his fellow citizens and for the shared conditions o f their com m on life. T h e root o f this civic virtue is the pity we experience for each other in the state o f nature; and this pity rests on a kind o f empathetic imagination, ‘transporting ourselves outside ourselves, and identifying ourselves with the suffering animal, leaving our being, so to speak, in order to take his . . . T h u s n o one becom es sensitive except when his imagination is animated and begins to transport h im self outside o f him self.’ 18 At the very root o f social relations lies the aesthetic, source o f all human bonding. I f bourgeois society releases its individuals into lonely autonomy, then only by such an imaginative exchange or appropriation o f each other’s identities can they be deeply enough united. Feeling, R ousseau claim s in Emile, precedes knowledge; and the law o f conscience is such that what I feel to be right is right. Even so, social harmony cannot be grounded in such sentim ents alone, which suffice only for the state o f nature. In the state o f civilization, such sympathies must find their formal

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articulation in law, which involves a sim ilar ‘exchange’ o f subjects: ‘Each o f us puts his person and all his pow er in common under the suprem e direction o f the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each m em ber as an indivisible part o f the whole.’ 19 In R o u sseau ’s view, for the subject to obey any law other than one it has personally fashioned is slavery; no individual is entitled to command another, and the only legitimate law is thus o f a self-conferred kind. I f all citizens alienate their rights entirely to the community, ‘each man, in giving him self to all, gives him self to nobody’, and so receives h im self back again as a free, autonom ous being. T h e citizen surrenders his ‘bad* particularism - his narrowly selfish interests and through the ‘general will* identifies instead with the good o f the whole; he retains his unique individuality, but now in the form o f a disinterested commitment to a common well-being. T h is fusion o f general and particular, in which one shares in the whole at no risk to one’s unique specificity, resembles the very form o f the aesthetic artefact - though since R ousseau is not an organicist thinker, the analogy is only approximate. For the mystery o f the aesthetic object is that each o f its sensuous parts, while appearing wholly autonom ous, incarnates the ‘law’ o f the totality. Each aesthetic particular, in the very act o f determining itself, regulates and is regulated by all other self-determ ining particulars. T h e enheartening expression o f this doctrine, politically speaking, would be: ‘what appears as my su b ­ ordination to others is in fact self-determ ination’; the more cynical view would run: ‘my subordination to others is so effective that it appears to me in the mystified guise o f governing myself.1 T h e em ergent middle class, in an historic development, is newly defining itself as a universal subject. But the abstraction this process entails is a source o f aaxiety for a class w edded in its robust individualism to the concrete and the particular. I f the aesthetic intervenes here, it is as a dream o f reconciliation - o f individuals woven into intimate unity with no detrim ent to their specificity, o f an abstract totality suffused with all the flesh-and-blood reality o f the individual being. As H egel writes o f classical art in his Philosophy o f Fine A rt: ‘T hough no violence is done . . . to any feature o f expression, any part o f the whole, and every m em ber appears in its independence, and rejoices in its own existence, yet each and all is content at the sam e time to be only an aspect in the total evolved presentation.’20 R ousseau’s general will, as a kind o f mighty totalizing

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artefact, might be seen as imaginative empathy assum ing a rational, objective form. R ousseau does not think that feeling can simply replace rational law; but he does hold that reason in itself is insufficient for social unity, and that to become a regulative force in society it must be anim ated by love and affection. It is thus that he quarrelled with the Encyclopaedists, whose dream o f reconstructing society from pure reason seem ed to him simply to erase the problem o f the subject. And to overlook the subject is to ignore the vital question o f political hegemony, which the ultra-rationalism o f the Enlightenment is pow erless in itself to address. ‘Sensibility’, then, would seem unequivocally on the side o f the progressive middle class, as the aesthetic foundation o f a new form o f polity. Yet if the conservative Edm und Burke found R ousseau’s sentimentalism offensive, he was also revolted by what he saw as his im pious rationalism. Such rationalism seem ed to Burke just that effort to reconstruct the social order from metaphysical first principles which was most calculated to undermine an organic cultural tradition o f spontaneous pieties and affections.21 Rationalism and sentimentalism do indeed in this sense go together: if a new social order is to be constructed on the basis o f virtue, custom and opinion, then a radical rationalism m ust first o f all dis m ande the political structures o f the present, submitting their m indless prejudices and traditionalist privileges to disinterested critique. Conversely, both rationalism and an appeal to feeling can be found on the political right. I f the given social order defends itself in Burkeian fashion through ‘culture’ - through a plea for the values and affections richly implicit in national tradition - it will tend to provoke an abrasive rationalism from the political left. T h e left will round scathingly on the ‘aesthetic’ as the veiy locus o f mystification and irrational prejudice; it will denounce the insidiously naturalizing pow er which Burke has in mind when he comments that custom s operate better than laws, ‘because they becom e a sort o f N ature both to the governors and the governed’.22 If, however, the existing order ratifies itself by an appeal to absolute law, then the ‘subjective’ instincts and passions which such law seem s unable to encom pass can becom e the basis o f a radical critique. T h e form which these conflicts take is partly determined by the nature o f the political power in question. In late eighteenth-century Britain, an evolved tradition o f bourgeois democracy had produced a

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social order which sought on the whole to work ‘hegemonicaIly\ however savagely coercive it could also show itself. Authority, as Burke recommends, has regard to the sen ses and sentiments o f at least some o f its subjects; and in this situation two alternative counter-strategies becom e available. One is to explore the realm o f affective life which authority seeks to colonize and turn it against the insolence o f power itself, as in some eighteenth-century cults o f sensibility. A new kind o f human subject - sensitive, passionate, individualist - poses an ideological challenge to the ruling order, elaborating new dimensions o f feeling beyond its narrow scope. Alternatively, the fact that power utilizes feelings for its own ends may give rise to a radical rationalist revolt against feeling itself, in which sensibility is assailed as the insidious force which binds subjects to the law. If, however, political dominance assum es in Germ an fashion m ore openly coercive forms, then an ‘aesthetic* counter-strategy - a cultivation o f the instincts and pieties over which such power rides roughshod - can always gather force. Any such project, however, is likely to be deeply ambivalent. For it is never easy to distinguish an appeal to taste and sentiment which offers an alternative to autocracy from one which allows such power to ground itself all the more securely in the living sensibilities o f its subjects. T h ere is a world o f political difference between a law which the subject really does give to itself* in radical democratic style* and a decree which still descends from on high but which the subject now ‘authenticates1. Free consent may thus be the antithesis o f oppressive power, or a seductive form o f collusion with it. T o view the emergent m iddle-class order from either standpoint alone is surely too undialectical an approach. In one sense, the bourgeois subject is indeed mystified into mistaking necessity for freedom and oppression for autonomy. F o r power to be individually authenticated, there must be constructed within the subject a new form o f inwardness which will do the unpalatable work o f the law for it, and all the more effectively since that law has now apparently evaporated. In another sen se, this policing belongs with the historic victory o f bourgeois liberty and democracy over a barbarously repressive state. As such, it contains within itself a genuinely utopian glimpse o f a free, equal community o f independent subjects. Power is shifting its location from centralized institutions to the silent, invisible depths o f the subject itself; but this shift is also part o f a profound political

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emancipation in which freedom and com passion, the imagination and the bodily affections, strive to make themselves heard within the discourse o f a repressive rationalism. T h e aesthetic, then, is from the beginning a contradictory, doubleedged concept. On the one hand, it figures as a genuinely emancipatory force - as a community o f subjects now linked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling rather than by heteronomous law, each safeguarded in its unique particularity while bound at the sam e time into social harmony. T h e aesthetic offers the middle class a superbly versatile model o f their political aspirations, exemplifying new form s o f autonomy and self-determination, transforming the relations between law and desire, morality and knowledge, recasting the links between individual and totality, and revising social relations on the basis o f custom, affection and sympathy. On the other hand, the aesthetic signifies what M ax H orkheim er has called a kind o f ‘internalised repression’, inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies o f those it subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective m ode o f political hegemony. T o lend fresh significance to bodily pleasures and drives, however, if only for the purpose o f colonizing them more efficiently, is always to risk foregrounding and intensifying them beyond one’s control. T h e aesthetic as custom, sentim ent, spontaneous impulse may consort well enough with political domination; but these phenomena border embarrassingly on passion, imagination, sensuality, which are not always so easily in co rp o ra te . As Burke put it in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs: ‘T h ere is a boundary to m en’s p assions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence o f imagination.’23 ‘D eep* subjectivity is just what the ruling social order desires, and exactly what it has m ost cause to fear. I f the aesthetic is a dangerous, am biguous affair, it is because, as we shall see in this study, there is som ething in the body which can revolt against the power which inscribes it; and that impulse could only be eradicated by extirpating along with it the capacity to authenticate power itself.

Notes 1 Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, translated by K. Aschcnbrenner and W. B. Holther (Berkeley, 1954), p. 43. For a useful recent

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

essay on Baumgarten, see Rodolphe Gasché, ‘O f aesthetic and historical determination’, in D. Attridge, G. Bennington and R. Young (cds), PostStructuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987). See also David E. Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in theAge of Reason (Cambridge, 1984), chapter 2, and K.E. Gilbert and H. Kuhn,/4 History o f Esthetics (New York, 1939), chaptcr 10. For a splendid survey o f English and German aesthetics from which I have benefited a good deal in chapters 1 and 2, sec Howard Caygill, ‘Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society 1640-1790’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Sussex, 1982; and see Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford, 1989). Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, p. 38. Quoted by Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy o f the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951), p. 340. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, 1970), p. 156. Ibid. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, 1964), p. 110. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l'éducation (Paris, 1961), vol. IV, p. 388. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London, 1971), p. 268. Jean-Jacqucs Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. G.D.H. Cole (London, 1938), p. 48. See Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), pp. 80-4. For the relation between custom and law in the Enlightenment, see I.O. Wade, The Structure and Form o f the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1977), vol. 1, Part 11. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia,p.82. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a UniversalHistory’, in I. Kant, On History, cd. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1963), p. 15. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacqucs Rousseau (Bloomington, 1954), pp. 62-3. Sec Louis Althusser, ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971). Rousseau, Émtley vol. IV, p. 261. Rousseau, The Social Contract, p. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art (London, 1920), vol. 11, p. 10 (translation slightly amended).

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21 Sec Annie Marie Osborn, Rousseau and Burke (London, 1940), a work which at one point strangely speaks of Burke as an Englishman. Sec also, for Rousseau’s political thought, J. H. Broome, Rousseau: A Study of his Thought (London, 1963); Stephen Ellenburg, Rousseau's Political Philosophy (Ithaca, 1976); Roger D. Master, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968); Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (London, 1972), Pan 3. 22 Edmund Burke, An Abridgement of English History, quoted in W. J. T . Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago, 1986), p. 140. 23 The Works of Edmund Burke, ed. George Nichols (Boston, 1865-7), vol. 4, p. 192.

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The Law of the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume Burke

,

W hile the G erm an middle class languished beneath the yoke o f nobility, their English counterparts had been energetically at work transform ing a social order still heavily aristocratic in nature to their own advantage. Uniquely among European nations, the English landowning elite had itself long been a capitalist class proper, already accustom ed to wage labour and commodity production as early as the sixteenth century. T hey thus anticipated by a considerable period that conversion from feudal to capitalist agriculture which the Prussian Junkerdom would accomplish, more partially and precariously, only in the wake o f its defeat in the N apoleonic wars. At once the most stable and wealthy estate-owners in Europe, the English patriciate succeeded superbly in combining high capitalist productivity on the land with an enviable degree o f cultural solidarity and unbroken continuity. It was within this unusually favourable matrix, offering at once the general preconditions for further capitalist development and a resilient political framework to safeguard it, that the English m ercantile class was able to inaugurate its own key institutions (the stock exchange, the Bank o f England), and secure the predominance o f its own form o f political state (parliam ent), in the aftermath o f the 1688 revolution. U nder these propitious conditions, Britain was able to emerge in the eighteenth century as the world’s leading com m ercial power, vanquishing its foreign rivals and extending its im perial sway across the globe. By the mid-eighteenth century, L on don had becom e the largest centre o f international trade, the prem ier port and warehouse o f the world, and witnessed the forging o f som e spectacular fortunes. T h e Hanoverian state, staffed and controlled by the aristocracy, protected and promoted mercantile

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interests with impressive zeal, securing for Britain a rapidly expanding economy and an immensely profitable empire. In eighteenth-century Britain, then, we encounter a robust, wellfounded unity o f agrarian and mercantile interests, accompanied by a m arked ideological rapprochement between new and traditional social elites. T h e idealized self-im age o f this ruling social bloc is less o f itself as a ‘state’ class than as a ‘public sphere* - a political formation rooted in civil society itself, whose m em bers are at once stoutly individualist and linked to their fellows by enlightened social intercourse and a shared set o f cultural m anners. Assured enough o f its political and economic stability, this governing bloc is able to dissem inate som e o f its power in the form s o f a general culture and ‘civility’, founded less on the potentially divisive realities o f social rank and economic interest than on common styles o f sensibility and a homogeneous reason. ‘Civilized’ conduct takes its cue from traditional aristocratism: its index is the fluent, spontaneous, taken-for-granted virtue o f the gentleman, rather than the earnest conformity to som e external law o f the petty bourgeois. M oral standards, while still implacably absolute in themselves, may thus be to som e extent diffused into the textures o f personal sensibility; taste, affect and opinion testify more eloquently to one’s participation in a universal comm on sense than either moral strenuousness or ideological doctrine. Both o f these now carry with them ominous reminiscences o f a disruptive puritanism. Yet if the prototype o f this public sphere is drawn from the realm o f gentility, the predominance it grants to individual sensibility, the free circulation o f enlightened opinion, and the abstractly equalized status o f its socially diverse participants, mark it also as a peculiarly bourgeois social formation. A community o f sensibility consorts as well with the bourgeois’s stout empiricist disregard for metaphysical abstraction, and also with his deepening dom estic sentimentalism, as it does with that carelessness o f theoretical justification which is the badge o f aristocracy. F o r both strata, an abstract rationalism now sinisterly recalls the metaphysical excesses o f the Commonwealth. I f social power is to be effectively naturalized, it must somehow take root in the sensuous immediacies o f empirical life, beginning with the affective, appetitive individual o f civil society, and tracing from there the affiliations which might bind him to a greater whole. T h e project o f early G erm an aesthetics, as we have seen, is to

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m ediate between genera! and particular, elaborating a kind o f concrete logic which will clarify the sensory world without abstracting it away. Reason must grant experience its peculiar density, without allowing it for a moment to escape; and this is hardly an easy tension to maintain. T h e proto-materialist im pulse o f this project soon surrenders to a full-blown formalism; indeed no sooner has sensation been ushered into the court o f reason then it is subjected to a rigorous discrimination. Only certain sensations are fit subject for aesthetic enquiry; and this means for the H egel o f the Philosophy o f Fine Art only sight and hearing, senses which are, as he says, ‘ideal’. Vision for H egel is ‘appetiteless’; all true looking is without desire. T here can be no aesthetics o f odour, texture or flavour, which are mere debased m odes o f access to the world. ‘Botticher’s m ere feeling with the hand o f the effeminately smooth portions o f statues o f goddesses’, Hegel rem arks frostily, ‘is not a part o f artistic contemplation or enjoyment at all.’ 1 Reason, then, in some sense selects those perceptions which already appear to collude with it. T h e aesthetic representation o f a K an t is quite as unsensual as the concept, expelling the materiality o f its object. But if Germ an rationalism has a problem in descending from the universal to the particular, the dilemma o f British em piricism is quite the reverse: how to move from the particular to the general without the latter merely collapsing back into the former. I f rationalism is politically vulnerable, it is because it risks a mere empty totalization which expels the experiential; if empiricism is politically problematic, it is because it has difficulty in totalizing at all, m ired as it is in a web o f particulars. It is the impossible conundrum o f a ‘science o f the concrete’ : how is a ruling order to root itself in the sensuously immediate, yet elaborate this into something more com pelling than a heap o f fragments? Em piricism risks ending up trapped here in som e intolerable im passe, either undoing its own totalizations at every step, or subverting immediacy in the very effort to ground it more securely. I f rationalism feels the need to supplem ent itself with the logic o f the aesthetic, then it would seem that empiricism was all along too aesthetic for its own good. How is a thought already so thoroughly sensationalized to break the hold o f the body over it, drag itself free o f the clammy em brace o f the senses and rise to som ething a little more conceptually dignified? T h e answer, perhaps, is that there is no need. Could we not stay with the senses themselves, and find there our deepest relation to an

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overall rational design? What if we could discover the trace o f such a providential order on the body itself, in its m ost spontaneous, prereflexive instincts? Perhaps there is som ewhere within our immediate experience a sense with all the unerring intuition o f aesthetic taste, which discloses the moral order to us. S u ch is the celebrated ‘moral sense* o f the British eighteenth-century m oralists, which allows us to experience right and wrong with all the swiftness o f the senses, and so lays the groundwork for a social cohesion m ore deeply felt than any m ere rational totality. I f the moral values which govern social life are as self-evident as the taste o f peaches, a good deal o f disruptive wrangling can be dispensed with. Society as a whole, given its fragm ented condition, is increasingly opaque to totalizing reason; it is difficult to discern any rational design in the workings o f the market place. But we might turn nevertheless to what seem s the opposite o f all that, to the stirrings o f individual sensibility, and find there instead ou r surest incorporation into a common body. In our natural instincts o f benevolence and compassion we are brought by som e providential law, itself inscrutable to reason, into harmony with one another. T he body’s affections are no mere subjective whims, but the key to a wellordered state. M orality, then, is becoming steadily aestheticized, and this in two related senses. It has been moved closer to the springs o f sensibility; and it concerns a virtue which like the artefact is an end in itself. We live well in society neither from duty nor utility, but as a delightful fulfilment o f our nature. T h e body has its reasons, o f which the mind may know little: a benign providence has so exquisitely adapted our faculties to its own ends as to make it keenly pleasurable to realize them. T o follow out our self-delighting im pulses, provided they are shaped by reason, its unwittingly to prom ote the common good. O ur sense o f morality, the Earl o f Shaftesbury argues, consists in ‘a real antipathy or aversion to injustice or wrong, and in a real affection or love towards equity and right, for its own sake, and on account o f its natural beauty and worth*.2 T h e objects o f moral judgem ent are for Shaftesbury' as immediately attractive or repulsive as those o f aesthetic taste, which is not to convict him o f moral subjectivism. On the contrary’, he believes strongly in an absolute, objective moral law, rejects the suggestion that immediate feeling is a sufficient condition o f the good, and holds like Hegel that the moral sense must be educated and disciplined by reason. H e also rejects the hedonist

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creed that the good is simply what pleases us. Even so, all moral action for Shaftesbury' must be m ediated through the affections, and w'hat is not done through affection is simply non-moral. Beauty, truth and goodness are ultimately at one: what is beautiful is harmonious, what is harm onious is true, and what is at once true and beautiful is agreeable and good. T h e morally virtuous individual lives with the grace and symmetry o f an artefact, so that virtue may be known by its irresistible aesthetic appeal: ‘F o r what is there on earth a fairer matter o f speculation, a goodlier view or contemplation, than that o f a beautiful, proportion’d, and becoming action?’3 Politics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined: to love and admire beauty is ‘advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue, which is itself no other than the love o f order and beauty in society’.4 Truth for this passedover Platonist is an artistic apprehension o f the world’s inner design: to understand som ething is to grasp its proportioned place in the whole, and so is at once cognitive and aesthetic. Knowledge is a creative intuition which discloses the dynamic forms o f N ature, and h as about it a brio and exuberance inseparable from pleasure. Indeed N ature for Shaftesbury is itself the suprem e artefact, brimful with all possibilities o f being; and to know it is to share in both the creativity and the sublime disinterestedness o f its M aker. T h e root o f the idea o f the aesthetic is thus theological: like the work o f art, G o d and his world are autonom ous, autotelic and utterly self-determining. T h e aesthetic is a suitably secularized version o f the Almighty himself, not least in its blending o f freedom and necessity. M ere libertinism must be rejected for a freedom based on law’, restraint seen as the very basis o f emancipation: in the work o f art, as in the world in general, ‘the truly austere, severe, and regular, restraintive character . . . corresponds (not fights or thwarts) with the free, the easy, the secure, the bold.’5 A s the grandson o f the founder o f the W hig party*, Shaftesbury is a firm upholder o f civic liberties, and in this sense an eloquent spokesm an for the bourgeois public sphere o f eighteenth-century England. Yet he is also a notable traditionalist, an aristocratic neoPlatonist fiercely antagonistic to bourgeois utility and self-interest.6 H orrified by a nation o f Hobbesian shopkeepers, Shaftesbury speaks up for the ‘aesthetic’ as its alternative: for an ethics entwined with the sen suou s affections, and for a human nature which is a selfpleasuring end in itself. In this sense, he is able to furnish bourgeois

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society, from his traditional aristocratic resources, with some rather m ore edifying, experiential principle o f unity than its political or economic practice can provide. H is philosophy unites the absolute law o f the old school with the subjective freedom o f the new, sensualizing the one while spiritualizing the other. H is genially aristocratic trust that sociality is rooted in the very structure o f the human animal runs counter to the whole o f bourgeois practice; yet it can supply just the felt, intuitive links between individuals that the m iddle class urgendy needs, unable as it is to derive any such positive corporate existence from either market place or political state. Shaftesbury is in this sense a central architect o f the new political hegemony, o f justified European renown. Cusped conveniently between traditionalism and progress, he introduces the bourgeois public sphere to a rich humanist heritage, aesthcticising its social relations. But he also clings firmly to that absolute rational law which will prevent such relations from lapsing into mere libertinism or sentimentalism. T o live ‘aesthetically* for Shaftesbury is to flourish in the wellproportioned exercise o f one’s powers, conforming to the law o f one’s free personality in the casual, affable, taken-for-granted style o f the stereotypical aristocrat. What the middle class can learn from this doctrine is its stress on autonomy and self-determination - its deconstruction o f any too rigid opposition between freedom and necessity, impulse and law. I f the aristocrat gives the law to him self individually, the bourgeoisie aspires to do so collectively. T o this extent, the middle class inherits the aesthetic as a legacy from its superiors; but som e aspects o f it are more usable than others. T he aesthetic as the rich, all-round development o f human capacities is bound to prove something o f an em barrassm ent for a class whose economic activity leaves it spiritually impoverished and one-sided. T h e bourgeoisie can appreciate the aesthetic as self-autonomy, but much less as wealth o f being, realized purely for its own sake. By the time it has embarked upon its industrial career, its leaden, repressive H ebraism will seem light years removed from Schiller’s ‘grace’, Burke’s ‘enjoyment’ or Shaftesbury’s delight in wit and ridicule. ‘W ealth o f being’, indeed, will become in the hands o f Arnold, Ruskin and William M orris a powerful critique o f middle-class individualism. I f

the aesthetic is in part a bequest from nobility to middle class, then, it 36

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is a divided, ambivalent one - a set o f key concepts for the new social order, but also for the critical tradition which opposes it. In the ‘moral sense* philosophers, then, ethics, aesthetics and politics are drawn harmoniously together. T o do good is deeply enjoyable, a self-justifying function o f our nature beyond all crass utility. T h e moral sense, as Francis Hutcheson argues, is ‘antecedent to advantage and interest and is the foundation o f them’.7 Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson speaks o f virtuous actions as beautiful and vicious ones as ugly or deform ed; for him too, moral intuition is as swift in its judgem ents as aesthetic taste. ‘ Human society*, writes A dam Sm ith in his Theory o f M oral Sentiments, when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philo­ sophical light, appears like a great, an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects. As in any other beautiful and noble machine that was the production o f human art, whatever tended to render its movements more smooth and easy, would derive a beauty from this effect, and, on the contrary, whatever tended to obstruct them would displease on that account: so virtue, which is, as it were, the fine polish to the wheels o f society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like the vile rust, which m akes them jar and grate upon one another, is as necessarily offensive.8 T h e whole o f social life is aestheticized; and what this signifies is a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it. Virtue, the easy habit o f goodness, is like art beyond all m ere calculation. A sound political regime is one in which subjects conduct themselves gracefully - where, as we have seen, the law is no longer external to individuals but is lived out, with fine cavalier insouciance, as the very principle o f their free identities. Such an internal appropriation o f the law is at once central to the work o f art and to the process o f political hegemony. T h e aesthetic is in this sen se no more than a name for the political unconscious: it is simply the way social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities. T h e beautiful is just political order lived out on the body, the way it strikes the eye and stirs the heart. I f it is

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inexplicable, beyond all rational debate, it is because our fellowship with others is likewise beyond all reason, a s gloriously pointless as a poem . T h e socially disruptive, by contrast, is as instandy offensive as a foul smell. T h e unity o f social life sustains itself, requiring no further legitimation, anchored as it is in our m ost primordial instincts. Like the work o f art, it is immune from all rational analysis, and so from all rational criticism. T o aestheticize morality and society in this way is in one sense the m ark o f a serene confidence. I f moral responses are as self-evident as the taste o f sherry, then ideological consensus m ust run deep indeed. W hat more flattering compliment could there be to the rationality o f the social whole than that we apprehend it in the least reflective aspects o f our lives, in the m ost apparendy private, wayward o f sensations? Is there even any need for som e cumbersom e apparatus o f law and the state, yoking u s inorganically together, when in the genial glow o f benevolence we can experience our kinship with others as immediately as a delectable taste? In another sense, one m ight argue, moral sense theory testifies to a bankrupt tendency o f bourgeois ideology, forced to sacrifice the prospect o f a rational totality to an intuitive logic. Unable to found ideological consensus in its actual social relations, to derive the unity o f humankind from the anarchy o f the market place, the ruling order must ground that consensus instead in the stubborn self-evidence o f the gut. We know there is more to social existence than self-interest, because we feel it. W hat cannot be socially demonstrated has to be taken on faith. T h e appeal is at once empty and potent: feelings, unlike propositions, cannot be controverted, and if a social order needs to be rationally justified then, one might claim, the Fall h as already happened. Yet to found society on intuition is not without its problem s, as the critics o f these theorists were quick to see.9 I f the moral sense philosophers help to oil the wheels o f political hegemony, they also provide, contradictorily, what can be read as a discourse o f utopian critique. Speaking up from the G aelic margins (H utcheson, H um e, Sm ith, Ferguson and others), or from a threatened traditional culture (Shaftesbury), these thinkers denounce possessive individualism and bourgeois utility, insisting like Sm ith that the m aladroit workings o f reason can never render an object agreeable or disagreeable to the mind for its own sake. Before we have even begun to reason, there is already that faculty within us

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which makes us feel the sufferings o f others as keenly as a wound, sp u rs us to luxuriate in another’s joy with no sense o f self-advantage, stirs us to detest cruelty and oppression like a hideous wound. T h e disgust we feel at the sight o f tyranny or injustice is as previous to all rational calculation as the retching occasioned by some noxious food. T h e body is anterior to self-interested rationality, and will force its instinctual approbations and aversions upon our social practice. T he vicious, Shaftesbury considers, m ust certainly be wretched; for how could som eone violate the very core o f his or her compassionate being and still be happy? T h e Hobbesian ideology' is fatally flawed, and bound to come to grief: how can any vision survive which flattens all that makes men and women what they are - their tender delight in each other’s well-being, their relish for human company as an end in itself - to this base caricature? I f there is no developed language o f political protest against such a travesty, then at least there is the aesthetic, the very sign and model o f disinterestedness. D is­ interestedness here means indifference not to others* interests, but to on e’s own. T h e aesthetic is the enemy o f bourgeois egoism: to judge aesthetically m eans to bracket as far as possible one’s own petty prejudices in the name o f a common general humanity. It is in the act o f taste above all, David Hum e argues in his essay ‘O f the Standard o f T aste *, that ‘considering m yself as a man in general, |I must] forget, if possible, my individual being, and my peculiar circum stances’.10 Aesthetic disinterestedness involves a radical dccentring o f the subject, subduing its self-regard to a community o f sensibility with others. It is thus in its vacuously idealist way the image o f a generous new conception o f social relations, the enemy o f all sinister interests. Only the imagination, Adam Sm ith considers, can furnish an authentic bond between individuals, carrying us beyond the selfish com pass o f the senses into mutual solidarity: ‘ [our senses] never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception o f what are (the other’s) sensations’.11 T h e imagination is frailer than sense but stronger than reason: it is the precious key releasing the empiricist subject from the prison-house o f its perceptions. I f the access it allows us to others is poorer than direct bodily experience, it is at least m ore immediate than reason, for which the very reality o f others is bound to remain a speculative fiction. T o imagine is to have a kind o f im age, suspended somewhere between percept and concept, o f what

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it feels like to be som ebody else; and the moral sense philosophers are convinced that nothing less than this will ever be ideologically effective. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and H um e are deeply sceptical o f the power o f mere rational comprehension to move men and women to politically virtuous action. From this viewpoint, the British rationalist thinkers emerge as dangerously deluded: purveyors o f an abstract ethics, they wantonly elide the entire medium o f senses and sentim ents through which alone such imperatives could take on flesh in hum an lives. T h e aesthetic is in this sense the relay or transmission m echanism by which theory is converted to practice, the detour taken by ethical ideology through the feelings and senses so as to reappear as spontaneous social practice. I f to aestheticize morality' is to make it ideologically effective, it is also to risk leaving it theoretically disarm ed. ‘O ur ideas o f morality, if this account is right’, complains the rationalist Richard Price, ‘have the sam e origin with our ideas o f the sensible qualities o f bodies, the harmony o f sounds, or the beauties o f painting and sculpture . . . Virtue (as those who embrace this scheme say) is an affair o f taste. M oral right and wrong signify nothing in the objects themsehes to which they are applied, any more than agreeable and harsh; sweet and bitter; pleasant and painful; but only certain effects in u s . . . All our discoveries and boasted knowledge vanish, and the whole universe is reduced into a creature o f fancy. Every sentiment o f every being is equally ju st.*12 Price is a militant anti-aesthetician, scandalized by this ram pant subjectivizing o f values. T h e sen ses and the imagination can take us nowhere in moral enquiry, but must yield to the understanding. Is torture wrong merely because we find it distasteful? I f the moral, like the aesthetic, is a quality o f our responses to the object, are actions mere blank texts coloured simply by our sentiments? And what if those sentiments disagree? U nable to derive values from facts - which is to say, to ground m oral ideology in bourgeois social practice - the moral sense theorists turn instead to the notion o f value as autotelic. But they do this, so their opponents claim, at the cost o f aestheticizing it away, dissolving it into the vagaries o f subjectivism. In seeking to lodge an objective ethics more securely in the subject, they end up dissevering the two, leaving a delicate sensibility confronting a commodified object stripped o f its inherent properties. T o be sentim ental is to consum e less the object itself than one’s own fine feelings about it. I f ideology

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is to work efficiently, it must be pleasurable, intuitive, self-ratifying: in a w ord, aesthetic. But this, in a striking paradox, is exactly what threatens to undermine its objective force. T h e very move o f inserting ideology m ore deeply in the subject ends up by subverting itself. T o aestheticize moral value is in one sense to display an enviable confidence: virtue consists fundamentally in being oneself. Yet it also betrays a considerable anxiety: virtue had better be its own reward, since in this sort o f society it is unlikely to receive any other. We have som ething finer and subtler than the concept to bind us into mutuality, namely a sentiment which appears every bit as metaphysically founded as one’s taste in stockings. T o appeal to rational foundations, on the other hand, would seem little more o f a solution in a society where a rational grasp o f the whole, granted that it is even possible, seem s to have little influence on actual behaviour. T h e ruling order is accordingly caught between a rational ethics which seems ideologically ineffectual, and an affectively persuasive theory which appears to rest on nothing more intellectually reputable than what Richard Price scornfully terms ‘a species o f mental taste’. Shaftesbury’s unity o f ethics and aesthetics, virtue and beauty, is m ost evident in the concept o f manners. M anners for the eighteenth century signify that meticulous disciplining o f the body which converts morality to style, deconstructing the opposition between the proper and the pleasurable. In these regulated forms o f civilized conduct, a pervasive aestheticizing o f social practices gets under way: m oral imperatives no longer impose themselves with the leaden weight o f som e Kantian duty, but infiltrate the very textures o f lived experience as tact or know-how, intuitive good sense or inbred decorum . I f the process o f hegemony is to be successful, ethical ideology m ust lose its coercive force and reappear as a principle o f spontaneous consensus within social life. T h e subject itself is accordingly aestheticized, living with all the instinctual rightness o f the artefact. Like the work o f art, the human subject introjects the codes which govern it as the very source o f its free autonomy, and so com es in Althusserian phrase to work ‘all by itself1, without need o f political constraint.13 T h at ‘lawfulness without a law’ which K ant will find in the aesthetic representation is first o f all a matter o f the social Lebenswelt, which seem s to work with all the rigorous encodement o f a rational law, but where such a law is never quite abstractable from the concretely particular conduct which instantiates it.

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T h e middle class has won certain historic victories within political society, by dint o f long struggle; but the problem with such struggles is that, in rendering the Law perceptible as a discourse, they threaten to denaturalize it. Once the law o f authority is objectified through political conflict, it becom es itself a possible object o f contestation. L egal, political and economic transformations must therefore be translated into new forms o f unthinking social practice, which in a kind o f creative repression or amnesia can come to forget the very conventions they obey. It is thus that Hegel writes in the Phenomenology o f Spirit, with a sardonic eye on subjectivism, o f ‘the blessed unity o f the law with the heart’.14 Structures o f power must become structures o f feeling; and the aesthetic is a vital mediation in this shift from property to propriety. Shaftesbury, comments Ernst Cassirer, requires a theory o f beauty' ‘in order to answer the question o f the true fashioning o f character, o f the law governing the structure o f the inward personal world’.15 ‘M anners’, writes Edm und Burke, are more important than laws. U pon them, in a great m easure, the laws depend. T h e law touches us but here and there, and now and then. M anners are what vex and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us . . . T hey give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they add morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them .16 W e encounter the law, if we are lucky, only sporadically, as an unpleasantly coercive power; but in the aesthetics o f social conduct, or ‘ culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure o f our life. If politics and aesthetics, virtue and beauty, are deeply at one, it is because pleasurable conduct is the true index o f successful hegemony. A graceless virtue is thus som ething o f a contradiction in terms, since virtue is that cultivation o f the instinctive habit o f goodness o f which social fluency* is the outward expression. T h e maladroit or aesthetically disproportioned thus signals in its m odest way a certain crisis o f political power. I f the aesthetic com es in the eighteenth century to assum e the significance it does, it is because the word is shorthand for a whole project o f hegemony, the massive introjection o f abstract reason by the life o f the senses. What matters is not in the first place art, but this

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process o f refashioning the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law. It would thus ideally be as inconceivable for the subject to violate the injunctions o f power as it would be to find a putrid odour enchanting. T h e understanding knows well enough that we live in conformity to impersonal laws; but in the aesthetic it is as though we can forget about all that - as though it is m who freely fashion the laws to which we subject ourselves. Hum an nature, writes Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ‘will not submit to unlimited coercion*, and the law must be accordingly framed to accommodate the interests and desires o f those over whom it holds sway.17 T h e moment when moral actions can be classified chiefly as ‘agreeable’ or ‘disagreeable*, when these aesthetic terms will do service for more complex distinctions, m arks a certain mature point o f evolution in the history' o f a social class. O nce the dust and heat o f its struggles for political power have subsided, moral questions which were at that time necessarily cast in stridendy absolutist terms may now be allowed to crystallize into routine response. Once new ethical habits have been installed and naturalized, the sheer quick feel or im pression o f an object will be enough for sure judgement, shortcircuiting discursive contention and thus mystifying the rules which regulate it. I f aesthetic judgem ent is every bit as coercive as the most barbarous law - for there is a right and a wrong to taste quite as absolute as the death sentence - this is not at all the way it feels. T he social order has grown beyond the point where it was at every moment the subject o f apocalyptic debate, and its rulers can now settle down to enjoying the fruits o f their labour, shifting from polem ic to pleasure. ‘ It has been the misfortune . . . o f this age*, Burke writes in The French Revolution, ‘that everything is to be discussed, as if the constitution o f our country' were to be always a subject rather o f altercation, than enjoyment.*18 T h e m ost glorious work o f art is the English Constitution itself, unformalizable yet ineluctable. Puritan utility will yield ground to an aestheticism o f power only when society is redefined as an artefact, having no instrumental purpose beyond ou r self-delight. It is then that the strenuous habits o f philosophy will give place to wit, that genteel act o f jouissance in which a thought lives and dies in a single ludic moment. I f one wished to name the most important cultural instrument o f this hegemony in the nineteenth century, one which never ceases to grasp universal reason in

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concretely particular style, uniting within itself an economy o f abstract form with the effect o f lived experience, one might do worse than nam e the realist novel. As Franco M oretti has written: It is not enough that the social order is ‘legal’; it m ust also appear symbolically legitimate. . . It is also necessary that, as a Tree individual*, not as a fearful subject but as a convinced citizen, one perceives the social norms as one's own. One must internalise them and fuse external com ­ pulsion and internal impulse into a new unit until the former is no longer distinguishable from the latter. T h is fusion is what we usually call ‘consent* or ‘legitimation*. If the Bildungsroman appears to us still today as an essential, pivotal point o f our history, this is because it has succeeded in representing this fusion with a force o f conviction and optimistic clarity that will never be equalled again.19 T h e growing aestheticization o f social life, then, represents a m ajor hegem onic advance on the part o f the governing bloc. But it is not, as we have seen, without its attendant dangers. Richard Price once m ore, in his Review o f M orals: ‘But what can be more evident, than that right and pleasure, wrong and pain , are a s different as a cause and its effect; what is understood, and what is felt, absolute truth, and its agreeableness to the mind?*20 Price is well aware o f the perils o f this subjectivizing current, as is his more celebrated namesake Fanny Price, heroine o f Mansfield Park. T o uphold moral standards in a dissolute social order, Fanny must to som e degree sacrifice the aesthetically agreeable in her Kantian devotion to duty, which then renders the moral law visible in all its unlovely im periousness. T h at this gesture is at once admirable and, from an ideal standpoint, som ething o f a regrettable necessity is the sign o f an ideological dilem m a. In one sense, nothing could strengthen power more than its diffusion through the unconscious textures o f everyday life. Yet in another sense this diffusion threatens fatally to undermine it, debasing its diktats to the level o f enjoying an apple. ‘Sensibility* seem s at once the surest foundation, and n o foundation at all. B u t there is another danger too, which is quite as potentially harm ful. G erm an aesthetics was bom as a kind o f supplem ent to pure reason; bu t we have learned from Ja c q u e s D errida that it is in the

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m anner o f such lowly supplem ents to end up supplanting what they are meant to subserve.21 What if it were the case that not only morality, but cognition itself, was ‘aesth etic? T h at sensation and intuition, far from figuring as its opposites, were in fact its very basis? T h e name for this alarm ing claim in Britain is David H um e, who not content with reducing morality to m ere sentim ent, threatens also to reduce knowledge to fictional hypothesis, b elief to an intense feeling, the continuity o f the s e lf to a fiction, causality to an imaginative construct and history to a kind o f text.22 Indeed N orm an K em p Sm ith holds that H u m e’s originality lies precisely in his inverting o f the traditional priorities o f reason and feeling, seein g Francis H utcheson as the primary influence on his thought.23 H um e brackets ‘m orals and criticism* together in the Introduction to his Treatise o f Human Nature, and holds that morality ‘consists not in any matter o f facty which can be discovered by the understanding . . . when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you m ean nothing, bu t that from the constitution o f your nature you have a feeling or sentim ent o f blam e from the contemplation o f it’.24 Like other moral sen se theorists, H um e argues in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles o f M orals that ‘virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own account, without fee and reward, merely for the im m ediate satisfaction which it conveys’.25 I f H um e lends his support to the acstheticization o f ethics, he also extends the gesture to the understanding. Probable reason, he claim s in the Treatisey is nothing but a species o f sentim ent’ (103), and belief is no more than ‘a more vivid and intense conception o f any idea’ (120), ‘more properly an act o f the sensitive, than o f the cogitative part o f our natures’ (183). All reasonings, he maintains, ‘are nothing bu t the effect o f custom ; and custom h as no influence, but by inlivening the imagination, and giving us a strong conception o f any object’ (149). It follows for the Enquiry that ‘C ustom , then, is the great guide o f human life* (44), a case whose implications for political hegemony Edm und Burke will not be slow to seize on. Causality, in perhaps the m ost notorious o f all H u m e’s doctrines, is radically subjectivized: it resides less in objects themselves than ‘in the determination o f the mind to pass from one to the other* (166), an im pulse entirely conditioned by imaginative expectation. Continuous identity, somewhat similarly, is a quality which we attribute to things, a bond we feel rather than perceive. H u m e speaks in a revealing

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aesthetic image o f the mind as ‘a kind o f theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety o f postures and situations* (253). T h e imagination, indeed, is for Hum e ‘the ultimate judge o f all system s o f philosophy’ (255). L est this appear too fragile a basis on which to erect a theory, he instandy distinguishes between those imaginative principles which are ‘permanent, irresistable [sic], and universal’, and those which are ‘changeable, weak, and irregular* (225). In the extraordinary Conclusion to the first book o f the Treatise, however, we observe the poignant spectacle o f this distinction crum bling away to nothing in his hands. Having laid out his system with aplomb, Hum e breaks down before our eyes, turning helplessly to the reader in an access o f anxiety. H e feels him self to be ‘some strange uncouth monster’, expelled from all human society and ‘left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate’ (264). W hat possible foundation, he asks himself, does he have for these scandalous assertions, which would seem to shake rational enquiiy to its very roots? I f belief is no m ore than a vivacious sort o f feeling, m ust not his belief that this is the case be no more than this too, boom eranging pointlessly on itself? ‘A fter the m ost accurate and exact o f my reasonings’, he confesses, ‘I can give no reason why I should assent to [this view]; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me* (265). T h ere can be no appeal beyond experience and habit, which stimulate the imagination; and it is on these slender supports that all assent, and hence all social consensus, is based. ‘T h e memory, senses, and understanding, are, therefore, all o f them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity o f our ideas’ (265). In an intended addition to the Treatise, Hum e acknowledges how completely this ‘vivacity’ slips through the conceptual net in the effort to distinguish between beliefs and fictions: ‘when I would explain this manner, I scarce find any word that fully answers the case, but am oblig’d to have recourse to every one’s feeling, in order to give him a perfect notion o f this operation o f the mind. An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us . . .’ (629). T h e imagination, source o f all knowledge, is, so Hum e tells us, an ‘inconsistent and fallacious’ principle (265), which is why philosophy tends to come unstuck; two pages later, having just reduced reason to imagination, he protests that ‘Nothing is more

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dangerous to reason than the flights o f the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion o f more m istakes am ong philosophers’ (267). T h e very principle o f reason, in short, would seem the subversion o f it. T h e clue to this apparent inconsistency' lies in a distinction between wilder and more reliable form s o f imagining: we m ust reject ‘all the trivial suggestions o f the fancy, and adhere to the understanding, that is, to the more general and more established properties o f the im agination' (267). What will rescue us from the imagination is reason, which is just another version o f it; the imagination m ust be rejected for - the imagination. T h is deconstruction is then in turn deconstructed. T h e under­ standing, when it acts alone, ‘entirely subverts itself’: it consists in nothing m ore than a dizzying infinite regress, in which we check the probability o f our assertions, then check our checking and then check that, at each stage moving further away from the original evidence and introducing fresh uncertainties. What can arrest this abysm al plunge into scepticism is, o f all things, the imagination, which in the form o f custom ary sentiment induces us to view ‘certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account o f their custom ary connexion with a present impression* (183). What we feel o f the certainty o f the near, in other words, countervails the infinite regress o f understanding; it is beneficial that our beliefs are based on feeling, on som e ‘sensation or peculiar m anner o f conception’ (184), for if they were not there would be nothing to stop reason spiralling ceaselessly down its own indeterm inacies, one doubt doubting another to infinity. However, in so far as this clinging to the near which arrests reason's self-destruction is itself a ‘singular and seem ingly trivial property o f the fancy' (268), it belongs to exactly die kind o f inferior imagination which H um e h as just told us constitutes the ch ief threat to reason. Either, then, we may dism iss all elaborate processes o f reasoning out o f hand, adhering to what feels closest and surest; or we may cling, whatever its perils, to a sophisticated rationality. T h e former option is not only unpleasandy drastic, cutting us o ff at a stroke from all science and philosophy, but self-contradictory, since it is only by an elaborate process o f reasoning that we arrive at it. I f we stay faithful to reason, however, we land up with the self-undoing cognitions o f the sceptic, and so might as well not have bothered. ‘We have, therefore,' H um e remarks gloomily, ‘no choice left but betwixt a

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false reason and none at all’ (268). H is solution to the dilemma is, in effect, to forget about it, since the problem is itself an instance o f highly refined reasoning, and ‘Very refined reflections have little or no influence upon u s’ (268). Practical people do well not to become engrossed by such metaphysical questions - though we can hardly formulate this as a universal imperative, since this is precisely part o f what is in d o u b t H um e’s solution, in brief, is a carefully cultivated false consciousness, which consigns the whole vexed affair to com fortable oblivion: he goes o ff to play backgammon and make m erry with his friends, and will later find his own speculations so ridiculous that he has no heart to pursue them further. Rather like som e contemporary sceptics in the field o f literary theory, one continues to catch trains and rear one’s children, cook food and lace on e’s boots, in cavalier disregard o f one’s theoretical doubts about the ontological solidity o f all this. Theory and practice, far from being mutually supportive, are entirely at odds, so that for Hum e only some form o f Nietzschean amnesia would seem to hold society together. It is a sobering thought, however, that society survives only by dint o f intellectual suicide, and Hum e is understandably rattled by his own defensive strategy. Custom ary practice no longer mediates absolute norm s, but actually substitutes itself for them. Practices must provide their own rationales, and theory, far from securing them, now actively

disables them. If intuition persuades you that there is truth, theory inform s you that there is just intuition. In an ironic reversal, society itself, which works by custom and blind sentiment in the manner o f N ietzsche’s healing Apollonian illusions, assum es that there is som ew here som e solid ground for its conduct, which philosophy can supply; philosophy, supposed to demonstrate such grounds, brutally whittles them away to custom and sentiment. Paradoxically, the philosopher is an anti-social monstrosity precisely because he reduces ideas to social practices - because his thought imitates how society actually is. Society itself, by contrast, is rem orselessly metaphysical, gullibly convinced that its opinions have som e unimpeachable basis. T h e layperson in fact lives by habit but trusts that there is more to the world than this; the philosopher faithfully reflects the pragmatic truth o f this condition, and so becom es an outcast from it. H e is a monster not because he com es bearing som e oudandish m essage from beyond the social pale, but because he arrives hotfoot with the rather more disturbing news that the habits o f human nature are all there is. T h e

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hairy prophet howling in the wilderness is the one who discloses the dreadful secret that backgammon is more or less what it com es down to. T h e sole lame justification Hum e can then find for philosophy is that it is relatively toothless - less socially disruptive, for example, than religious superstition. I f the metaphysical is a natural possibility o f the mind, if humanity cannot rest content with its narrow circuit o f sen se im pressions, then better for it to fantasize in the ‘mild and m oderate* style we term philosophy, than to cook up dangerously fanatical schem es. Philosophy may be somewhat absurd, but at least it is unlikely to topple the state. W e seem , then, to have traced a kind o f circle. Reason, having spun o ff with Baum garten the subaltern discourse o f aesthetics, now appears to have been swallowed up by it. T h e rational and the sensuous, far from reproducing one another’s inner structure, have ended up wholly at odds. ‘T h u s there is*, Hum e comments in the Treatise, ‘a direct and total opposition betwixt our reason and our sen ses’ (231). Striving to incarnate themselves in daily practice, rational ordinances are now at risk o f being reduced to i t Reason seeks in the aesthetic to encom pass the experiential; but what, to paraphrase N ietzsche, if experience were a woman? What if it were that elusive thing that plays fast and loose with the concept? At once intimate and unreliable, precious and precarious, experience would seem to have all the duplicity o f the eternal female. It is this treacherous terrain that Baum garten m ust subject to reason. T h e British moral sense thinkers follow a more liberal path: the feminine, in the form o f pure intuition, is a surer guide to moral truth than the m asculine cult o f calculative reason. But such intuitions do not hang in the air: they' are the inscription within u s o f a providential logic too sublim e for rational decipherment. T h e feminine is thus no more than a passage or mode o f access to the m asculine regime o f Reason, whose sway, whatever the alarmed protests o f rationalists like Price, rem ains largely unchallenged in most moral sense philosophy. It will not prove very hard, however, to kick away this providential platform altogether; and this in effect is what happens in H um e, who has little patience with the metaphysical baggage tied to the moral sense by som e o f his colleagues. H um e takes over som ething o f Francis H utcheson’s ethics but strips that case o f its strongly providential cast, substituting for this the harder-headed idea o f social utility. T h e experience o f beauty for Hum e is a kind o f sympathy arising from

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reflected utility: the aesthetically appealing object pleases by virtue o f its uses to the species as a whole. H is essay 4O f the Standard o f Taste* su ggests just how unstable such aesthetic criteria are: ‘the sentiments o f m en’, he writes, ‘often differ with regard to beauty and deform ity’,26 and though he is insistent that there are indeed universal standards o f taste, it is not easy' for him to say where they are to be found. Som e aesthetic conflicts, the essay ends by acknowledging, are sim ply irresolvable, ‘and we seek in vain for a standard, by which we can reconcile the contraiy sentim ents’.27 Indeed Hum e seeks in vain for a sure standard in anything. Know ledge, belief, ethics: all these have now been rem orselessly ‘ feminized*, converted one by one to feeling, imagination, intuition. N o t only these, indeed, but the whole material foundation o f the bourgeois social order. H um e finds no metaphysical sanction underpinning private property, which depends like everything else on the imagination. O ur relentlessly metonymic minds simply find it natural to make a permanent state o f affairs out o f som ebody’s possessin g som ething at a particular time. We also tend to make a natural imaginative connection between objects we own and others contiguous to them, like the work o f our slaves or the fruits o f our garden, which we therefore feel we can claim as well. (Since the imagination p asses more easily from sm all to great rather than vice vena , it might seem m ore logical for a sm all proprietor to annex a larger contiguous object rather than the other way round; so Hum e h as to engage in a deft piece o f philosophical footwork to justify, for exam ple, the British possession o f Ireland.) I f all o f this naturalizes possessive individualism, it also scandalously demystifies all talk o f m etaphysical rights. T h ere is no inherent reason why my property should not be yours tomorrow, were it not for that imaginative inertia which m akes it easier to associate it with m e. Since the idea o f my constant possession o f a thing is imaginatively closer to my actual possession o f it than than is the notion o f your ownership o f it, the indolence o f the imagination tends conveniently to confirm my possession in perpetuity. H um e, in other w ords, is fully conscious o f the fictional nature o f the bourgeois economy, blandly proclaiming that property ‘is not any thing real in the objects, but is the offspring o f the sentim ents . . . ’ (509). T h e whole o f bourgeois society is based on m etaphor, metonymy, imaginary correspondence:

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T h e sam e love o f order and uniformity, which arranges the books in a library, and the chairs in a parlour, contributes to the formation o f society, and to the well-being o f mankind, by modifying the general rule concerning the stability o f possession. As property form s a relation betwixt a person and an object, *tis natural to found it on som e preceding relation; and as property is nothing but a constant possession, secur’d by the laws o f society, *tis natural to add it to the present possession which is a relation that resem bles it. (5 0 4 -5 n ) W hat guarantees the property rights o f the middle class is less the law o f econom ics than the instinctual economizing o f the mind. I f imagination is in this way the unstable foundation o f civil society, it is, curiously enough, a lack o f imagination which forms the basis o f the political state. Sin ce individuals are governed largely by selfinterest, their imaginative sympathy with what lies beyond this narrow circuit tends to be feeble; so that though they all share an interest in m aintaining social justice, it is one they are likely to feel only dimly. O bjects close to us strike us with more imaginative force than those m ore distant; and the state is a regulative mechanism which com pensates for this parochial deficiency, com posed as it is o f individuals who have a direct interest in ensuring the observance o f justice. Politics springs from a failure o f imagination; civil society is anchored in it; and so also is the realm o f moral or interpersonal relations. Pity and com passion, the very ground o f our social solidarity, involve an imaginative empathy with others, for H um e as m uch as for Adam Sm ith. ‘All human creatures are related to us by resem blance. T h eir persons, therefore, their interests, their passions, their pains and pleasures must strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original one; since a lively idea is easily converted into an im pression* (369). Relations with others involve a kind o f inner artistic miming o f their inward condition, a set o f im aginary correspondences; and H um e illustrates his point with an aesthetic im age, that o f the sympathy for suffering we experience when watching tragic dram a. Society, then, is based on a faculty which in its ‘proper* functioning ensures stability and continuity, but which as H um e recognizes

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carries within it the perm anent structural possibility o f prejudice and extravagant fantasy. T h e principle o f social cohesion is thus at the sam e time a source o f potential anarchy. I f this ‘feminine’ aestheticizing is alarming, however, it has a ‘m asculine’ counterpart which is equally problematic. Like Jo sep h B u d er or Imm anuel K ant, one can appeal away from sentiment to a moral duty which has no direct relation to human pleasure or happiness. But this is to replace one kind o f ‘aesthetic’ morality with a different kind: il leaves morality, like the artefact, self-grounding and self-determining, a lofty end in itself beyond all utility. Womanly feeling is thus ousted by the phallic absolutism o f conscience and the inner light. In neither case can m oral values be derived from concrete social relations: either they m ust be validated by instinct, or they must validate themselves. It is not surprising, given what is at stake in these debates, that Edm und Burke should begin his work on the sublime and the beautiful by seeking to defend the possibility o f a science o f taste. I f beauty is merely relative, then the bonds which leash society together are in danger o f loosening. Beauty for Burke is not just a question o f art: I call beauty a social quality; for when men and women, and not only they, but when other anim als give us a sense o f joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sentiments o f tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind o f relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary.28 Burke is quite confident that such taste is uniform and universal: *1 never remem ber that anything beautiful, whether a man, a beast, a bird, or a plant, w as ever shown, though it were to a hundred people, that they did not all immediately agree that it was b eau tifu l. . . ’ (70). I f aesthetic judgem ent is unstable, then so must be the social sym pathies founded on it, and with them the whole fabric o f political life. Uniformity o f taste for Burke must be dependent on a uniformity o f the senses themselves; but he is realistic enough to recognize that the sen ses are actually variable, and aesthetic responses accordingly

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divergent. Burke’s political conservatism is thus to som e degree at o dd s with his empiricist psychology. T h e se discrepancies o f response, however, can be laid at the door o f individuals themselves, rather than o f taste itself, which remains self-identical throughout its manifold irregular expressions. ‘Whilst we consider taste merely according to its nature and species, we shall find its principles entirely uniform; bu t the degree in which these principles prevail, in the several individuals o f mankind, is altogether as different as the principles them selves are similar’ (78). It is as though human size is absolutely unalterable, even though individuals happen to be o f different heights. W hat knits society together for Burke, as with H um e, is the aesthetic phenomenon o f m im esis, which is a matter more o f custom than o f law: i t is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly. T h is form s our m anners, our opinions, our lives. It is one o f the strongest links o f society; it is a species o f mutual compliance, which all men yield to each other without constraint to themselves, and which is extremely flattering to all’ (101). Law s or precepts are simply derivatives o f what is first nurtured through customary practice, and coercion is thus secondary to consent. We becom e human subjects by pleasurably imitating practical forms o f social life, and in the enjoyment o f this lies the relation which binds us hegemonically to the whole. T o mime is to subm it to a law, but one so gratifying that freedom lies in such servitude. Such consensuality is less an artificial social contract, laboriously wrought and maintained, than a kind o f spontaneous m etaphor or perpetual forging o f resem blances. T h e only problem is where all this imitating ends: social life for Burke would appear a kind o f infinite chain o f representations o f representations, without ground or origin. I f we do as others do, who do the sam e, then all o f these copies would seem to lack a transcendental original, and society is shattered to a w ilderness o f mirrors. T h is ceaseless mutual mirroring has about it something o f the stasis o f the imaginary', and if taken too literally would spell the death o f difference and history. ‘Although imitation is one o f the great instrum ents used by Providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection, yet i f men gave themselves up to imitation entirely, and each followed the other, and so on in an eternal circle, it is easy to see

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that there could never be any improvement am ongst them* (102). T h e very conditions which guarantee social order also paralyse it: sunk in this narcissistic closure, m en o f affairs grow effete and enervated, sympathy becom es cloying and incestuous, and beauty sinks to a by­ word for stagnation. Som e countervailing energy is therefore necessary', which Burke discovers in the virile strenuousness o f the sublim e. ‘T o prevent this [complacency], G o d has planted in man a sen se o f ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation o f his excelling his fellows in som ething deem ed valuable amongst them* (102). T h e sublim e is on the side o f enterprise, rivalry and individuation: it is a phallic ‘swelling* arisin g from our confrontation o f danger, although a danger we encounter figuratively, vicariously, in the pleasurable knowledge that we cannot actually be harm ed. In this sen se, the sublim e is a suitably defused, aestheticized version o f the values o f the ancien régime. It is a s though those traditionalist patrician virtues o f daring, reverence and free-booting ambition m ust be at once cancelled and preserved within m iddle-class life. As actual qualities, they m ust be outlawed by a state devoted to dom estic peace; b u t to avoid spiritual emasculation they m ust still be fostered within it in the displaced form o f aesthetic experience. T h e sublim e is an imaginary compensation for all the uproarious old upper-class violence, tragedy repeated as comedy. It is beauty’s point o f inner fracture, a negation o f settled order without which any order would grow inert and wither. T h e sublime is the anti-social condition o f all sociality, the infinitely unrepresentable which spurs us on to yet finer representations, the lawless m asculine force which violates yet perpetually renews the feminine enclosure o f beauty. Its social connotations are interestingly contradictory: in one sense the memory trace o f an historically surpassed barbarism , it also has som ething o f the challenge o f mercantile enterprise to a too-clubbable aristocratic indolence. Within the figure o f the sublim e, warring barons and busy speculators m erge to prod society out o f its specular sm ugness. T h e se , it may be noted, are the political thoughts o f a m an who as a child attended a hedge school in County Cork. A s a kind o f terror, the sublim e crush es us into admiring subm ission; it thus resem bles a coercive rather than a consensual power, engaging our respect but not, as with beauty, our love: ‘we subm it to what we adm ire, but we love what subm its to us; in one case we are forced, in the other flattered, into com pliance’ (161). T h e

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distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, then, is that between woman and man; but it is also the difference between what L o u is Althusser had called the ideological and the repressive state apparatuses.29 F o r Althusser, the repressive institutions o f society would seem to be purely negative; it is in ideology alone that we are constructed a s subjects. F o r Burke, a more subtle political theorist in this respect, this opposition can be to som e extent deconstructed. T h e sublim e may terrorize us into cowed subm ission, but since we are all constitutional m asochists who delight in being humiliated, this coerciveness contains the pleasures o f the consensual as well as the pains o f constraint. ‘Sensations o f a pleasurable nature have nothing inherently impelling about them’, writes Sigm und Freud in The Ego and the ldy ‘whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree. T h e latter impel towards change, towards discharge, and that is why we interpret unpleasure as implying a heightening and pleasure as a lowering o f energetic cathexis.’30 Conversely, the beauty which wins o u r free consent, and beguiles us like a woman, is based nevertheless on a kind o f cunningly dissim ulated law. Burke confesses that he can see no way o f uniting these two registers, which clearly poses a political problem . T h e dilemma is that the authority we love we do not respect, and the one we respect we do not love. ‘T h e authority o f a father, so useful to our well-being, and so ju sdy venerable upon all accounts» hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our m others, where the parental authority is alm ost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence’ (159). T h e political paradox is plain: only love will truly win us to the law, but this love will erode the law to nothing. A law attractive enough to engage our intimate affections, and so hegem onically effective, will tend to inspire in us a benign contempt. O n the other hand, a power which rouses our filial fear, and hence our subm issive obedience, is likely to alienate ou r affections and so spur us to Ocdipal resentment. Casting around desperately for a reconciling im age, Burke offers us, o f all things, the figure o f the grandfather, w hose male authority is enfeebled by age into a ‘feminine partiality’. M ary W ollstonecraft is quick to assail the sexism o f Burke’s argument in her Vindication o f the Rights o f Men. H is distinction between love and respect, she points out, aestheticizes women in ways which remove them from the sphere o f morality. ‘T h e affection (women) excite, to be uniform and perfect, should not be tinctured with the

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respect which the moral virtues inspire, lest pain should be blended with pleasure, and admiration disturb the soft intimacy o f love.*31 ‘T h is laxity o f morals in the female*, W ollstonecraft continues, ‘is certainly m ore captivating to a libertine imagination than the cold argum ents o f reason, that give no sex to virtue. But should experience prove that there is a beauty in virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily im plies exertion, a depraved sensual taste may give way to a m ore manly one - and melting feelings to rational satisfactions.*32 F o r W ollstonecraft, Burke is a kind o f aesthete who divorces beauty (woman) from moral truth (man); against this, she argues at once that virtue is sexless and that it involves a manly taste. We shall see, however, that Burke is not so much an aesthete as an aestheticizer, which m akes a significant difference. Authority, then, lives in a kind o f ceaseless self-undoing, as coercion and consent reinforce yet underm ine one another. An enervate beauty must be regularly shattered by a sublim e whose terrors m ust in turn be quickly defused, in a constant rhythm o f erection and detum escence. At the heart o f power lies the oxymoron ‘free bondage’, o f which the aesthetic is a vital symbol. T h e greater the freedom the deeper the bondage; but the more, by the sam e token, spontaneity can get out o f hand. T h e more the human subject works ‘all by itse lf’, the better - and the worse - for authority. I f freedom transgresses the subm ission which is its very condition, the repressiveness o f the sublime can be invoked; but this ultimate efficacy o f power is also its potential downfall, breeding as well as subduin g rebellion. Power is thus a kind o f riddle, o f which the mystery o f the aesthetic, with its impossibly lawless lawfulness, is an ap t sign. T h e aesthetic experience o f the sublim e is confined to the cultivated few; and there would thus seem the need for a kind o f poor p erson ’s version o f it. Religion is o f course one obvious such candidate; but Burke also proposes another, which is, surprisingly enough, the lowly activity o f labour. Like the sublim e, labour is a m asochistic affair, since we find work at once painful in its exertion yet pleasurable in its arousal o f energy. ‘As com m on labour, which is a m ode o f pain, is the exercise o f the grosser, a m odel o f terror is the exercise o f the finer parts o f the system’ (181). T h e sublime, with its ‘delightful horror’, is the rich m an’s labour, invigorating an otherwise dangerously complacent ruling class. I f that class cannot know the

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uncertain pleasures o f loading a ship, it can gaze instead at one tossed on the turbulent ocean. Providence has so arranged matters that a stale o f rest becom es soon obnoxious, breeding melancholy and despair; we are thus naturally driven to work, reaping enjoyment from its surmounting o f difficulties. Labour involves a gratifying coerciveness, and is thus an aesthetic experience all in itself, at least for those who theorize about it. Both material production and political life, base and superstructure, display a unity o f force and fulfilment. Hegem ony is not only a m atter o f the political state, but is installed within the labour process itself. O ur wrestling with N ature’s recalcitrance is itse lf a kind o f socialized sublime; and this agreeableness o f labour is even more gratifying to those who profit from it. W hat the aesthetic in Burke sets its face most firmly against is the notion o f natural rights. It is precisely that drily theoretic discource, a revolutionary one in his day, that the appeal to the intimate habits o f the body is out to worst. T h e essay on the beautiful and the sublim e is a subtle phenomenology o f the senses, a m apping o f the body’s delicacies and disgusts: Burke is fascinated by what happens when we hear low vibrations or stroke smooth surfaces, by the dilation o f the eye’s pupil in darkness or the feel o f a slight tap on the shoulder. H e is m uch preoccupied with sweet sm ells and violent startings from sleep, with the vibratory power o f salt and the question o f whether proportion is the source o f beauty in vegetables. All o f this strange hom espun psycho-physiology is a kind o f politics, willing to credit no theoretical notion which cannot somehow be traced to the m uscular structure o f the eye or the texture o f the fingerpads. I f there are indeed metaphysical rights, then they enter this dense som atic space as dispersed and non-identical: like ‘rays o f light which pierce into a dense m edium ’, Burke argues in Reflections on the French Revolution, such rights are ‘by the laws o f nature, refracted from their straight line’, enduring ‘such a variety o f refractions and reflections, that it becom es absurd to talk o f them as if they continued in the simplicity o f their original direction’.33 What is natural about such rights is their deviance or aberrancy; their self-dissem inatory power is part o f their very essence. When Burke adds that ‘the nature o f man is intricate; the objects o f society are o f the greatest possible complexity*, he speaks, in the original sense o f the term, a s an aesthetician. It is not that Burke rejects all concept o f the rights o f man. It is less that such rights do not exist than that they arc incapable o f definition.

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‘T h e rights o f man are in a sort o f middle, incapable o f definition, but not im possible to be discerned.’34 T hey are, in short, just like the laws o f the artefact, indubitably present yet im possible to abstract from their particular incarnations. Tradition, for Burke, is equally a kind o f lawfulness without law. T h e true danger o f the revolutionaries is that as fanatical anti-aestheticians they offer to reduce hegemony to naked power. T hey are Protestant extremists who would believe insanely that m en and women could look on this terrible law in all its nakedness and still live, who would strip from it every decent m ediation and consoling illusion, break every representational icon and extirpate every pious practice, thus leaving the wretched citizen helpless and vulnerable before the full sadistic blast o f authority. A ngered by this iconoclasm, Burke speaks up instead for what G ram sci will later term ‘hegemony’: But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which m ade power gende and obedience liberal, which harmonised assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentim ents which beautify- and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire o f light and reason. All the decent drapery o f life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe o f a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defect o f our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.35 With the executed M arie Antoinette in mind, Burke goes on to denounce revolutionary discourtesy to women: ‘All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as rom ance and folly.’ T h e law is male, but hegemony is a woman; this transvestite law, which decks itself out in female drapery, is in danger o f having its phallus exposed. Power is ceasing to be aestheticized: what grapples individuals to it on this radical view is less their affections than the gallows. T h e whole crucial middle region o f social life between state and economy, the rich tapestry o f custom s which transmute laws to feelings, is being disastrously abandoned.

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T h e se public sentiments, combined with manners, are required som etim es as supplem ents, som etim es as cor­ rectives, always as aids to law. T h e precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction o f poem s, is equally true as to states: Non satis est pulchra essepoemata, duleia sunto. T h ere ought to be a system o f manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. T o make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.36 W oman, the aesthetic and political hegemony are now in effect synonymous. W e can return in the light o f this to the quarrel between Burke and M ary W ollstonecraft. It is not quite true, as Wollstonecraft suggests, that Burke is an aesthete concerned to divorce beauty from moral truth. O n the contrary, he wishes to aestheticize such truth, in order to render it securely hegemonic. Woman, or beauty, thus becom es a kind o f mediation o f man; but what W ollstonecraft rightly sees is that this process does not operate in reverse. Beauty must be included within the sublimity o f the masculine law, in order to soften its rigours, but moral sublimity is not to be included within the beautiful. W omen are indeed in this sense excluded from the domain o f truth and morality. Burke deconstructs the opposition between beauty and truth, but only partially and unilaterally. Beauty is necessary for power, but does not itself contain it; authority has need o f the very femininity it places beyond its bounds. B urke’s plea for the aesthetic is not to be mistaken for som e errant subjectivism . T hough he believes strongly in an intuitive response antecedent to reason, he is stem on what he takes to be a pernicious aestheticizing o f moral value, and fulminates in his essay on aesthetics against ‘an infinite deal o f whimsical theory* which has ‘m isled us both in the theory' o f taste and o f m orals’ (159). We must not be induced by these fanciful flights to ‘remove the science o f our duties from their proper basis (our reason, our relations, and our necessities) to rest it upon foundations altogether visionary and unsubstantial* (159). Wrhen it com es to moral ideology, Burke is quite as absolute and objectivist as any rationalist: it is just that, like the moral sense theorists, he cannot believe that any power not appropriated by

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experience, lived on the body, will move men and women to their proper civic duties. But Shaftesbury, as we have seen, was a strong moral realist too, holding that virtue resides in the nature o f things rather than in custom, fancy’ or will. T h e moral relativism which others feared in him was exacdy what he him self denounced in the work o f his tutor Jo h n Locke, who ‘struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out o f the world and m ade the very ideas o f these . . . unnatural and without foundation in our m inds1.37 Francis Hutcheson, equally, distinguishes between rather than simply conflates the moral and aesthetic senses: to assert that we possess a moral sense as intuitive as the aesthetic is not to identify the one with the other. And David H um e, like Shaftesbury, believes that taste involves a firm commitment to the rational. F o r both men, false taste can be corrected by argument and reflection, as the understanding com es to intervene in the process o f feeling. T here is no question with any o f these thinkers o f som e wholesale abandonment o f head for heart. Even so, the general tendency o f this current o f thought can be seen as a steady undermining o f the mind in the name o f the body; and the political consequences o f this are ambivalent. On the one hand, there is surely no doubt that to affirm the claims o f affective experience against a ruthlessly exclusivist reason is in principle progressive. T h e very emergence o f the aesthetic marks in this sense a certain crisis o f traditional reason, and a potentially liberating or utopian trend o f thought. By the end o f the eighteenth century, such appeals to feeling will have becom e identified as dangerously radical. T h e re is in the aesthetic an ideal o f com passionate community, o f altruism and natural affection, which along with a faith in the self­ delighting individual represents an affront to ruling-class rationalism. O n the other hand, it might be claimed that such a movement comes eventually to represent a devastating loss for the political left. From Burke and Coleridge to Matthew’ Arnold and T . S . Eliot, the aesthetic in Britain is effectively captured by the political right. T h e autonomy o f culture, society as expressive or organic totality, the intuitive dogm atism o f the imagination, the priority o f local affections and unarguable allegiances, the intimidatory majesty o f the sublime, the incontrovertible character o f ‘immediate* experience, history as a spontaneous growth impervious to rational analysis: these are som e o f the forms in which the aesthetic becomes a weapon in the hands o f political reaction. Lived experience, which can offer a powerful

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critique o f Enlightenment rationality, can also be the very homeland o f conservative ideology. T h e clear bold light o f republican rationalism, and the intimate affective depths o f the poetic, come to figure throughout the nineteenth century as effective antinomies. T om Paine’s plain-minded scoffing at Burke’s extravagantly metaphorical diction is an earlier case in point: ‘M r. Burke’, he comments in The Rights ofM an , ‘should recollect that he is writing history and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant o f high-toned exclamation.’38 M ary W ollstonecraft writes scathingly o f B u rk e’s ‘pam pered sensibility’, viewing his reason as ‘the weather­ cock o f unrestrained feelings’ and his cast o f mind as lamentably effem inate. ‘Even the ladies, S ir,’ she m ocks, ‘may repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many o f your sentimental exclam ations.’39 H er own definition o f the rights o f man, so she proclaim s, will be by contrast a ‘manly’ one. After the work o f Blake and Shelley, myth and symbol in English literature becom es increasingly a preserve o f the political right, and ‘political poetry’ an effective oxymoron. T h e discourse o f radical rationalism w'ould seem peculiarly resistant to the aesthetic resistant, that is to say, to what are now the hegemonic definitions o f art. T h ere can be little truck between an analytic language o f political dissent and those subtly sensuous intensities which are now coming to monopolize the meaning o f poetry. At the sam e time, the aesthetic clearly cannot serve as a dominant ideology for the middle class, which in the turmoil o f industrial capitalist accumulation will need som ething a good deal more solid than sentim ent and intuition to secu re its rule. Sentim entalism , from the standpoint o f Victorian England, will appear increasingly as the badge o f an earlier, somewhat m ore serenely self-possessed bourgeoisie, which had yet to endure the cataclysms o f political revolution abroad and industrial trans­ formation at home. It is, o f course, still intensively cultivated on the sid e; but the ruling ideology o f Victorian England is a virulently antiaesthetic Utilitarianism, belated offspring o f Enlightenment rationalism. Self-in terest wins out over moral sense, as custom, tradition and sensibility are subjected to the cold light o f rational critique. Yet it is not easy to see how this bloodlessly analytic ideology can actually be lived: if the Benthamite subject m ust laboriously calculate the probable consequences o f each o f its actions, how can social practices ever be effectively naturalized? What has becom e o f habit and virtue,

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spontaneous impulse and the political unconscious? And how, shorn o f these features, can this upstart doctrine ever achieve moral hegemony? Alarmed by these lacunae, Jo h n Stuart M ill turns to a synthesis o f the rationalist and aesthetic traditions, reviving the language o f Burkeian hegemony: ‘(Benthamism] will do nothing . . . for the spiritual interests o f society; nor d oes it suffice o f itself even for the material interests. T h at which alone causes any material interests to exist, which alone enables any body o f human beings to exist as a society, is national character . . . A philosophy o f laws and institutions, not founded on a philosophy o f national character, is an absurdity . . -*40 Bentham, M ill claims, errs in considering only the moral aspect o f human conduct, whereas one must also have regard to its aesthetic (beautiful) and sympathetic (lovable) qualities. I f the error o f sentimentalism is to set the last two over against the first, the disaster o f an unreconstructed Utilitarianism is to ditch them entirely. All that remains to be done, then, is to dovetail Bentham and Coleridge together, viewing each as the other’s ‘completing counter­ part*. It is as though a structural contradiction in ruling-class ideology can be resolved by holding a different book in either hand. Yet M ill’s gesture is not as idly academ icist as it seem s. It is true that the industrial middle class, with its aridly instrumentalist doctrines, is incapable o f generating under its own steam a persuasive aesthetics - unable, that is, to develop the styles and form s which would weave its unlovely power into the fabric o f everyday life. T o do this it m ust look elsewhere, to what Antonio G ram sci termed the ‘traditional’ intellectuals; and this, in the evolution from the later Coleridge to John Ruskin and M atthew Arnold, is exactly what takes place. T h e uneasy nineteenth-century alliance o f patrician and philistine, culture and society, is am ong other things the tale o f an ideology in search o f hegemony - o f a spiritually disabled bourgeoisie constrained to go to school with an aestheticizing right which speaks o f organic unity, intuitive certainty and the free play o f the mind. T hat this aesthetic lineage also produces a powerful idealist critique o f bourgeois utility is the other side o f the story; if philistine and patrician are allied in som e ways, they are at loggerheads in others. Indeed the relations between them are an exemplary case o f the fraught connection between facts and values. T h e only truly com pelling moral ideology is one which succeeds in grounding itself to som e degree in real material conditions; if it fails to do so, its

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idealism will prove a constant source o f political embarrassment. D iscourses o f ideal value too palpably dissevered from the way men and women actually experience their social conditions merely mark their own redundancy, and are thus politically vulnerable. T h is is a progressive problem for the nineteenth-century middle class, which is still deeply dependent upon certain metaphysical values for its ideological legitimation, but which is in danger o f subverting som e o f those very values by the nature o f its material activities. Its secularizing, rationalizing practices are bringing many traditional pieties, not least religious ones, into increasing discredit; and in this sen se the nature o f the ‘base* is perilously at odds with the requirem ents o f the ‘superstructure*. T h e Kantian critique o f m etaphysics marks the point at which it has become theoretically difficult to justify' many o f the doctrines on which, in its routine ideological practices, the ruling order still relies. Industrial capitalism can by no m eans brusquely discount ‘spiritual* values; but such values will com e to have about them an increasingly hollow, implausible ring. As far as the Victorian bourgeoisie is concerned, the nostalgic neo-feudalism o f a Carlyle or a Ruskin can be neither credited nor entirely disowned: eccentric and risibly unreal though such visions m ay be, they are nevertheless a source o f ideological stimulus and m oral edification which the market place, at least for the lower orders, is distressingly unable to provide. T h e aesthetic is one answer to this vexed question o f how values are to be derived, in a condition where neither civil society nor the political state would seem to provide such values with a particularly plausible foundation. We have seen already some o f the difficulties involved for the m iddle class in founding its spiritual solidarity on the degraded basis o f civil society; and an alternative strategy is therefore to turn in Am oldian style to the state, as the ideal locus o f ‘culture*. T hroughout the nineteenth century, many a thinker had recourse to this apparently prom ising solution. It has, however, one signal drawback: the fact that the state is ultimately a coercive apparatus, and so at odds with the ideal o f a community which would be gratifyingly unconstrained. T h e whole point o f aesthetic taste, as a m odel o f spiritual community, is that it cannot be forced. If, then, value is increasingly hard to derive either from the way the world is or from the way it might feasibly becom e; if civil society is too lowly a habitation for it and the metaphysical too lofty a one, then there would

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seem no alternative but to acknowledge such value’s profound m ysteriousness. ‘M oral sense’ is equivalent to confessing that there is no longer any rationally demonstrable basis for value, even if we nevertheless continue to experience it. M orality, like aesthetic taste, becom es a je ne sais quoi: we just know what is right and wrong, as we know that H om er is superb or that som eone is standing on our foot. S u ch a viewpoint combines the dogmatism o f all appeals to intuition or ‘ felt experience’ with a serenely pre-Freudian trust in the subject’s im m ediate presence to itself. O ne aestheticizing response to the problematic origins o f value is thus to root value in the delicacies o f the affective body. Another, sharply different aestheticizing strategy is to found value not in sensibility, but in itself. In this perspective, value is not anything one could ever get behindy reduce to a m ore fundamental order or principle; it is radically self-derivative, a law unto itself which bows to no external determination. T h is, in effect, is the standpoint o f K an t’s second Critique, for which the moral law is wholly autonomous. One should be good not because it is pleasant or practical, but because it is moral to be so, in the sense that reason h as an interest in its own practical function. Such a case draws not upon the aesthetic as affective - indeed it sets its face sternly against all mere sensibility but upon the aesthetic as autotelic: as that which in divine fashion bears its ends entirely within itself, generates itself up miraculously out o f its own substance. This, move, to be sure, secures value absolutely; but it does so at the dire cost o f threatening to remove it from the material world in which it is supposed to be active. As with the early Wittgenstein, value is in a certain sen se no longer in the world at all. If value is thus inviolable, it is partly because it is invisible. T h e governing order would consequently seem left with little choice but to subjectivize value, thus drawing it rather too close for comfort to the relativistic flux o f daily life, or to seal it o ff from that sphere in a splendid autonomy not easily distinguishable from sheer impotence. O nce more, it is the dilemma o f either entrusting value to the mercies o f everyday civil society', or alienating it to an Olympian height where it will merely succeed in m easuring the disabling distance between itself and the actual world. In a notable historical irony, the birth o f aesthetics as an intellectual

discourse coincides with the period when cultural production is beginning to suffer the miseries and indignities o f commodification.

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T h e peculiarity o f the aesthetic is in part spiritual compensation for this degradation: it is just when the artist is becoming debased to a petty commodity producer that he or she will lay claim to transcendent genius. But there is another reason for the foregrounding o f the artefact which aesthetics achieves. What art is now able to offer, in that ideological reading o f it known as the aesthetic, is a paradigm o f more general social significance - an image o f selfreferentiality which in an audacious move seizes upon the very functionlessness o f artistic practice and transform s it to a vision o f the highest good. As a form o f value grounded entirely in itself, without practical rhyme or reason, the aesthetic is at once eloquent testimony to the obscure origins and enigmatic nature o f value in a society which would seem everywhere to deny it, and a utopian glimpse o f an alternative to this sorry condition. For what the work o f art imitates in its very poindessness, in the constant movement by which it conjures itself up from its own inscrutable depths, is nothing less than human existence itself, which (scandalously for the rationalists and Utilitarians) requires no rationale beyond its own self-delight. F o r this Romantic doctrine, the art work is most rich in political implications where it is m ost gloriously futile. It may also be, however, that the aesthetic does more than figure a new concept o f value. If it is on the one hand autonomous o f the real, it m ight also hold out a promise o f reconciling the sundered realms o f fact and value. F o r Baumgarten, as we have seen, the aesthetic is a region adjacent to but distinct from the cognitive; with H um e, the cognitive is steadily reduced to a form o f sensibility not far removed from the aesthetic. One can, however, look at the relation between these two spheres in a quite different way. When science contemplates the world, what it knows is an impersonal space o f causes and processes quite independent o f the subject, and so alarmingly indifferent to value. But the fact that we can know the world at all, however grim the news which this knowledge might have to deliver, m ust surely entail som e fundamental harmony between ourselves and it. F o r there to be knowledge in the first place, our faculties must be som ehow marvellously adjusted to material reality; and for Immanuel K an t it is the contemplation o f this pure form o f our cognition, o f its very enabling conditions, which is the aesthetic. T h e aesthetic is no longer on this view a mere supplement to reason, or a sentiment to which that reason can be reduced; it is simply the state in which

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comm on knowledge, in the act o f reaching out to its object, suddenly arrests and rounds upon itself, forgetting its referent for a moment and attending instead, in a wondering flash o f self-estrangem ent, to the miraculously convenient way in which its inmost structure seem s geared to the comprehension o f the real. It is cognition viewed in a different light, caught in the act, so that in this little crisis or revelatory' breakdown o f our cognitive routines, not what we know but that we know becomes the deepest, m ost delightful mystery. T h e aesthetic and the cognitive are thus neither divisible spheres nor reducible to one another. Indeed the aesthetic is not a ‘sphere* at all: it is just the moment o f letting go o f the world and clinging instead to the formal act o f knowing it. If, then, society has cleaved human experience down the middle, confronting an object drained o f intrinsic value with a subject now forced to generate all value from itself, the aesthetic will becom e in K an t’s hands a way o f healing that rift, reuniting humanity with a world which seem s to have turned its back on it. Notes 1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy ofFine Art (London, 1920), vol. I l l , p. 14. 2 Shaftesbury, ‘An Enquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit’, in L.A. SelbyBigge (ed.), British Moralists ((Oxford, 1897), p. 15. For the ‘moral sense’ school in general, see Stanley Grèan, Shaftesbury's Philosophy o f Religion and Ethics (Ohio, 1967); Henning Jensen, Motivation and the Moral Sense in Hutcheson's Ethical Theory (The Hague, 1971); Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the 18th Century (Princeton, 1945); Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: A Study o f Francis Hutcheson's Aesthetics (New York, 1976); R .L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1951); 3nd E. Tuvcson, ‘Shaftesbury and the Age of Sensibility’, in H. Anderson and J. Shea (eds), Studies in Aesthetics and Criticism (Minneapolis, 1967). For an account o f John Locke’s influence on Hutcheson, see J. Stolnitz, ‘Locke, value and aesthetics’, Philosophy, vol. 38 (1963). 3 Selby-Bigge, British Moralists p. 37. 4 Shaftesbury, Characteristics (Gloucester, M ass, 1963), vol. 1, p. 79. 5 Shaftesbury, Second Characters, quoted in Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy, p. 91. 6 For a suitably acerbic review of Shaftesbury’s regressive ideological tendencies, see Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance:

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7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in F. Nussbaum and L. Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century (New York, 1987). Hutcheson, ‘An Inquiry conccming the Original of our Ideas o f Virtue or Moral Good’, in Sclby-Bigge, British Moralists p. 70. Adam Smith, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, in Sclby-Bigge, British Moralists p. 321. For a useful account of problems o f social cohesion in the eighteenth century', see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-80: An Equaly Wide Survey (London, 1983), Introduction. It is worth pointing out that if the moral sense theorists are correct in what they affirm, then they are the last moralists. For if right conduct is grounded in intuition, then it is hard to see why there is a need for ethical discourse at all. The moral sense philosophers do o f course sec the need for such discourse as a way o f elaborating, clarifying and if necessary transforming our intuitions; but the tendency of their case at its most euphoric is to argue themselves steadily out o f business. Ethical discourse is necessary precisely because what counts as being, say, compassionate in particular circumstances is far from clear. The very existence o f ‘moral language* thus testifies to our moral self-opaqueness. It is precisely because of this self-opaqueness, and because we arc sometimes confronted with choices between incompatible goods, that the language o f ethics is necessary. David Hume, ‘O f the Standard of Taste’, in Essays (London, n.d.), p. 175. See also Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins o f ‘Aesthetic Dis­ interestedness’, Journal o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XX, no. 2 (1961). Selby-Bigge, British Moralists p. 258. Richard Price, ‘A Review o f the Principal Questions in Morals’, in Selby-Bigge, British Moralists pp. 106-7, 133. Louis Althusser, ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971). Hegel, Pheneomcnology o f Spirit (Oxford, 1977), p. 222. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951), p. 313. Edmund Burke, ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, quoted by Tony Tanner, Jan e Austen (London, 1986), p. 27. Baruch Spinoza, The Political Works, cd. A. G . Wcmham (Oxford, 1958), p. 93. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (London, 1955), p. 88. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (London, 1987), p. 16. Selby-Bigge, British Moralists p. 107. Sec Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1974), Part 2, chapter 2.

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22 As far as the ‘textuality’ o f history goes, Hume comments in his Treatise on the multiple copies by which any particular historical fact is trans­ mitted: ‘Before the knowledge of the fact could come to the first historian, it must be convey’d thro’ many mouths; and after it is committed to writing, each new copy is a new object, of which the connextion with the foregoing is known only by experience and observation’ (Treatise of Human Nature, p. 145). Hume well grasped, avant la lettre, the modern principle of ‘intertextuality’ and the scepticism with which it is sometimes coupled; he concludcs this piecc of argument with the claim that the evidence of all ancient history is now lost to us. 23 See Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London, 1941). See also, for useful accounts of Hume, Peter Jones, ‘Cause, Reason and Objectivity in Hume’s Aesthetics’, in D. W. Livingston and J . T . King (eds), Hume: A Revaluation (New York, 1976); Barry Stroud, Hume (London, 1977); Robert J. Fogclin, Hume's Skepticism in the Treatise o f Human Nature* (London, 1985), and Alasdair MacIntyre, H^hoseJustice? Which Rationality? (London, 1988), chapters 15 and 16. 24 David Hume, Treatise ofHuman Nature, ed. L. A. Sclby-Bigge (Oxford, 1978), p. 469. All subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically after quotations in the text. 25 David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1961), p. 293. All subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically after quotations in the text. 26 Hume, Essays, p. 165. 27 Ibid., p. 178. 28 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1906), vol. 1, p. 95. Al! subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically after quotations in the text. See also, for studies of the relations between Burke’s politics and aesthetics, Neal Wood, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension o f Burke’s Political Thought’, Journal of British Studies no. 4 (1964); Ronald Paulson, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, in Representations of Revolution (New Haven, 1983), and W. J. T . Mitchell, ‘Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility’, in Iconology (Chicago, 1986). 29 Althusser, ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. 30 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Sigmund Freud: On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 360. 31 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men (Gainesvjllc, Florida, 1960), p. 114. 32 Ibid., p. 116.

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, p. 59. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Quoted in Kivy, The Seventh Sense p. 9. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London, 1958), p. 22. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 5. John Stuart Mill, Essays on Bentham and Coleridge, cd. F. R. Leavis

(London, 1962), p. 73.

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3

The Kantian Imaginary

Why is it that m odem philosophy has returned so often to the question o f epistemology? Why should the drama o f subject and object, the fraught narrative o f their couplings and splittings, matchings and m isalliances, have so consistently dominated the m odem philosophical stage, like the tale o f two incompatible partners continually warring to gain an edge over each other, who nevertheless cannot relinquish their fatal fascination for one another and resolve yet again, after another painful separation, to make a go o f it? T h a t the individual subject should com e to occupy centre stage,

reinterpreting the world with reference to itself, follows logically enough from bourgeois economic and political practice. But the more the world is thus subjectivized, the more this all-priviledged subject begins to undermine the very objective conditions o f its own pre­ eminence. T h e wider the subject extends its imperial sway over reality, the more it relativizes that terrain to its own needs and desires, dissolving the world’s substance into the stuff* o f its own senses. Yet the more it thereby erodes any objective criteria by which to m easure the significance or even reality o f its own experience. T h e subject n eeds to know that it is supremely valuable; but it cannot know this if its own solipsism has cancelled out any scale by which such value m ight be assessed. What is this subject privileged over, if the world has been steadily dwindled to no more than an obedient mirror image o f itself? T h e bourgeois subject would seem in this sense a tragically self-defeating creature, one whose very self-affirmation turns in­ exorably back upon itself to eat away at its own enabling conditions. ‘W e m ust ponder the anomaly’, writes Fredric Jam eson ,

THE KANTIAN IMAGINARY

that it is only in the most completely humanised environment, the one the m ost fully and obviously the end product o f human labour, production, and transformation, that life becom es meaningless, and that existential despair first appears as such in direct proportion to the elimination o f nature, the non- or anti-human, to the increasing rollback o f everything that threatens human life and the prospect o f a well-nigh limitless control over the external universe.' A certain objectivity is the very condition o f subjecthood, which must have all the solidity o f a material fact, and yet which cannot be by definition any such thing. It is vital that the world confirms my subjectivity, yet I am a subject only in so far as I bring this world to be in the first place. In appropriating the whole o f external nature, the bourgeois subject discovers to its consternation that it has appropriated its own objectivity along with it. ‘ Objectivity* could here be roughly translated as the imperative: ‘You respect my property and 1*11 respect yours.’ T h e other establishes my objectivity by leaving me alone, and confers freedom and objectivity on him self in the sam e act. Property, the very mark and seal o f subjectivity, is nothing if not backed by a complex system o f legal safeguards and political guarantees; but the very subjectivism o f a property-owning order will tend to turn treacherously against all such objective sanctions, which can never have the sam e existential force or ontological reality as the subject itself. T h e non-subjective can be authenticated only through the m edium o f the subject’s experience, where it is always in peril o f being converted into selfhood and so abolished. Alternatively, that which rem ains beyond the se lf is equally derealized in a world where subjectivity is the m easure o f all things. T h e bourgeois subject requires som e Other to assure itself that its powers and properties are more than hallucinatory, that its activities have meaning because they take place in a shared objective w orld; yet such otherness is also intolerable to the subject, and must be cither expelled or introjected. T here can be no sovereignty without som eone to reign over, yet his very presence threatens to throw one’s lordship into jeopardy. T h at which confirm s the subject’s identity cannot help exposing it as constrained; to mark your limit (‘keep o ff my property!*) is to sketch, impossibly, my own. Without some standard o f objectivity, the subject is reduced to

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conferring value upon itself, in what is at once the defiant boast o f the m odem (‘I take value from m yself alone!*) and its hollow cry o f anguish (‘I am so lonely in this universe!*). It is the double nature o f hum anism , which appears to know no m iddle ground between the mania o f exerting its powers and the depressive knowledge that it does so in empty space. S o it is that K an t will strive to repair the subjectivist dam age wrought by H um e’s sceptical empiricism by restoring the objective order o f things, but restoring it - since there can now be no lapsing back into a subjectless rationalism - from within the standpoint o f the subject itself. In an heroic labour, the objective world m ust be salvaged from the ravages o f subjectivism and patiently reconstructed, but in a space where the subject, however constituted by the celebrated categories, is still sovereign. N ot only sovereign, indeed, but (in contrast to the sluggish subject o f em piricism ) buoyantly active, with all the productive energy o f an epistemological entrepreneur. T h e point will be to preserve that shaping energy without subverting the objective realm which guarantees its significance; and K an t will thus trace within the very texture o f the subject’s experience that which points beyond it to the reality o f the m aterial world. T h e productive activity o f this subject will secure objectivity rather than undermine it; there will be no more sawing away at the branch on which one sits. I f the essence o f subjccthood is freedom , then bourgeois man seem s condem ned to self-blindness at the very peak o f his powers, since freedom is by definition unknowable. What can be known is the determ inate; and all we can say o f subjectivity is that whatever it is it is certainly not that. T h e subject, the founding principle o f the whole enterprise, slips through the net o f representation and figures in its very uniqueness as no more than a mute epiphany or pregnant silence. I f the world is the system o f cognizable objects, then the subject which knows these objects cannot itse lf be in the world, any m ore than (as the early Wittgenstein remarks) the eye can be an object within its own visual field. T h e subject is not a phenomenal entity to be reckoned up along with the objects it moves among; it is that which brings such objects to presence in the first place, and so moves in a different sphere entirely. T he subject is not a phenomenon in the world but a transcendental viewpoint upon it. We can, so to speak, squint at it sideways as it gives itself along with the things it represents, but like the spectral other who walks beside you in The

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Waste Land it vanishes if you tiy to look at it straight. Getting a fix on the subject opens up the dizzying prospect o f an infinite regress o f m eta-subjects. Perhaps, then, the subject can figure only negatively, as empty excess or transcendence o f any particular. We cannot com prehend the subject, but as with the Kantian sublime we can, as it were, comprehend its incomprehensibility, which appears as the negation o f all determinacy. T h e subject seem s somehow squeezed out o f the very system o f which it is the lynchpin, at once source and supplem ent, creator and leftover. It is that which brings the world to presence, but is banished from its own creation and can by no means be deduced from it, other than in the phenomenological sense that there m ust be som ething which appearance is an appearance to. It governs and manipulates N ature, yet since it contains no particle o f materiality in its own m ake-up it is a mystery how it comes to have truck with anything as lowly as mere objects. T h is prodigal structuring power or unfathomable capacity seem s at the same time sheer paucity and negation, lying as it does at the very limit o f what can be known. Freedom is the veiy lifebreath o f the bourgeois order, yet it cannot be im aged in itself. T h e m om ent we try to encircle it with a concept, seize upon our own shadows, it slips over the horizon o f ou r knowledge, leaving nothing in our grasp but the grim law's o f necessity o f external N ature. T h e T denotes not a substance but a formal perspective upon reality, and there is no clear way o f descending from this transcendental unity o f apperception to one’s hum drum material existence in the world. T h e enterprise o f science is possible, but must fall outside the dom ain it investigates. Knower and known do not occupy a shared field, even if that intimate traffic between them which is knowledge might suggest that they do. I f freedom is to flourish, if the subject is to extend its colonizing sway over things and stamp them with its indelible presence, then system atic knowledge o f the world is essential, and this m ust include knowledge o f other subjects. You cannot hope to operate as an efficient capitalist in blithe ignorance o f the laws o f human psychology; and this is one reason why the ruling order needs at its disposal a body o f detailed knowledge o f the subject, which goes by the name o f the ‘human sciences’. W ithout knowledge you cannot hope to be free; yet knowledge and freedom are also in a curious sen se antithetical. I f it is essential to my freedom that I should know others, then it follows that they can know m e too, in which case my 73

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freedom may be curtailed. I can always console m yself with the thought that whatever can be known o f me is by definition not me, is heteronom ous to my authentic being, since the subject cannot be captured in an objective representation. B u t in this case, one might argue, I merely purchase my freedom at its own expense, gain it and lose it at a stroke; for 1 have now also deprived m yself o f the possibility o f knowing others in their very essence, and it might be thought that such knowledge is essential to my self-development. Know ledge, in other words, is to som e degree in contradiction with the power it exists to promote. For the ‘human sciences’, subjects m ust be intelligible and predictable; but the transparency which this entails is at odds with the doctrine o f the inscrutability o f the human with which capitalism strives to mystify its social relations. All knowledge, as Romanticism is aware, contains a secret irony or incipient contradiction: it must at once m aster its object and confront it a s other, acknowledge in it an autonomy it simultaneously subverts. T h e fantasy o f total technological omnipotence conceals a nightmare: in appropriating N ature you risk eradicating it, appropriating nothing but your own acts o f consciousness. T here is a similar problem with predictability, which in surrendering phenom ena into the hands o f the sociological priests threatens to abolish history. Predictive science founds the great progressive narratives o f m iddle-class history, but by the sam e stroke offers to undermine them, converting all diachrony to a secret synchrony. History as risk, enterprise and adventure is in deadlock with the most privileged form o f bourgeois cognition, the Eros o f history at odds with the Thanatos o f science. T o be free means to calculate the moves o f your competitors while remaining securely impervious to such calculability oneself; but such calculations may them selves modify one’s competitors’ behaviour in ways that impose limits on one’s own free project. T h ere would be no way for the mind to m aster this volatile situation as a whole; such knowledge, in K an t’s term s, would be the metaphysical fantasy o f a non-perspectival understanding. A certain blindness is the very condition o f bourgeois history, which thrives on its ignorance o f an assured outcome. Know ledge is power, but the more you have o f it the more it threatens to rob you o f your desire and render you impotent. F o r K ant, all cognition o f others is doomed to be purely phenom enal, forever remote from the secret springs o f subjectivity. Som eon e can tabulate my interests and desires, but if I am not to be a

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m ere empirical object I must be transcendent o f these things, o f all that can be m apped by empirical knowledge. N o such research can resolve the delicate issue o f how such interests and desires come to be mine - o f what it is for me, rather than you, to experience this particular yearning. Knowledge o f human subjects is impossible not because they are so devious, multiple and decentred as to be impenetrably opaque, but because it is simply a mistake to think that the subject is the kind o f thing that could ever possibly be known. It is just not a feasible object o f cognition, any more than ‘Being* is som ething we could know in the sam e m anner as a slab o f marzipan. W hatever we think we are knowing will always turn out to be some suitably spiritualized entity, thought along the lines o f a material object, the mere parody or ghostly after-im age o f a thing. Indeed Ja c q u e s Derrida has shown how, when K an t com es to imagine human freedom , he slips into conceiving this most immaterial o f realities in term s o f an organic natural object.2 T h e subject is absolutely nothing whatsoever o f an object - which is to say that it is a kind o f nothing, that this vaunted liberty is also a vacancy. O f course, to have a phenomenal knowledge o f others may in fact be enough for using them to our own advantage. But it may not be felt sufficient for constructing the kind o f universal subjectivity which a ruling class requires for its ideological solidarity. F o r this purpose, it

might be possible to attain to something which, while not strictly knowledge, is nonetheless very like it. T h is pseudo-knowledge is what is known as the aesthetic. When, for K ant, we find ourselves concurring spontaneously in an aesthetic judgem ent, able to agree that a certain phenomenon is sublime or beautiful, we exercise a precious form o f intersubjectivity, establishing ourselves as a com ­ munity o f feeling subjects linked by a quick sense o f our shared capacities. T h e aesthetic is in no way cognitive, but it has about it som ething o f the form and structure o f the rational; it thus unites us with all the authority o f a law, but at a m ore affective, intuitive level. W hat brings us together as subjects is not knowledge but an ineffable reciprocity o f feeling. And this is certainly one major reason why the aesthetic has figured so centrally in bourgeois thought. F o r the alarm ing truth is that in a social order m arked by class division and m arket competition, it may finally be here, and only here, that human beings belong together in som e intimate Gemeinschaft. At the level o f theoretical discourse, we know one another only as objects; at the

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level o f morality, we know and respect each other as autonom ous subjects, but can have no concept o f what this means, and a sensuous feeling for others is no essential element o f such knowledge. In the sphere o f aesthetic culture, however, we can experience our shared humanity with all the immediacy o f our response to a fine painting or magnificent symphony. Paradoxically, it is in the apparendy m ost private, frail and intangible aspects o f our lives that we blend m ost harm oniously with one another. T h is is at once an astonishingly optim istic and bitterly pessim istic doctrine. On the one hand: ‘How m arvellous that human unity can be found installed in the very inwardness o f the subject, and in that m ost seemingly wayward and capricious o f responses, aesthetic taste!’ O n the other hand: ‘How sickeningiy precarious human solidarity m ust be, if it can finally be rooted in nothing more resilient than the vagaries o f aesthetic judgem ent!* I f the aesthetic must bear the burden o f human community, then political society, one might suspect, must leave a good deal to be desired. K a n t’s own political society was not, o f course, by any m eans o f a fully-developed bourgeois kind; and to speak o f him as a bourgeois philosopher may therefore seem to som e merely anachronistic. TTiere are many ways, however, in which his thought adum brates the ideals o f m iddle-class liberalism - in which his thinking is utopian in that

positive, enrichening sense. From the heart o f autocracy, Kant speaks up bravely for values which will prove ultimately subversive o f that regim e; but it is curiously one-sided to claim K ant in this style as a liberal champion, and to overlook the ways in which his thought is already disclosing som e o f the problem s and contradictions o f the em ergent m iddle-class order. I f we cannot, strictly speaking, know the subject, then at least - so we can console ourselves - we can know the object. In a notable irony, however, this latter operation turns out in bourgeois society to be quite as unthinkable as the former. I f it is well known that K ant views the human subject as noumenal, quite beyond the pale o f conceptual enquiry, then it is even better known that he believes just the sam e o f the object, the infam ous, inscrutable Ding-an-sich which slides over one horizon o f our knowledge a s the phantasm al subject vanishes over the other. G eorg Lukacs has argued that this opaqueness o f the object in K an t is an effect o f reification, whereby material products rem ain heterogeneous in their rich particularity to the formal,

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com m odified categories which seek to encom pass them.3 T hey must accordingly be consigned to the ‘irrational* outer darkness o f the unknowable, leaving thought to confront the m ere shadow o f itself. T h e Ding-an-sich is in this sense less som e suprasensible entity than the m aterial limit o f all such reificatory thought, a faint echo o f the real’s mute resistance to it. T o recover the so-called thing in itself as use-value and social product would then be simultaneously to reveal it a s suppressed social totality, restoring those social relations which the comm odified categories bleach out. Preoccupied with materiality though K an t undoubtedly is, it is as though matter cannot appear in all its irreducibility within the Kantian system ; but it is precisely this m atter, in the form o f certain contradictory social relations, which gen erates the structure o f the entire system in the first place. T h e thing in itself is thus a kind o f empty signifier o f that total knowledge which the bourgeoisie never ce ase s to dream of, but which its own fragmenting, dissevering activities continually frustrate. In the act o f knowing, the subject cannot help b u t project from its inevitably partial perspective the phantasm al possibility o f a knowledge beyond all categories, which then risks striking what it can know meagrely relative. T h e subject languishes in the grip o f a rabid epistemophilia which is at once logical to its project - to hold the whole world in a single thought! - and potentially subversive o f i t For such metaphysical delusions simply distract it from the proper business o f actual knowledge, which m ust always be knowledge from one perspective or another. ‘On the one hand*, writes L u kâcs, ‘ [the bourgeoisie] acquires increasing control over the details o f its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. O n the other hand, it loses - likewise progressively - the possibility o f gaining intellectual control o f society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership.’4 At the height o f its dom inance, then, the bourgeois class finds itself curiously dispossessed by the order it h as created, w edged as it is between an unknowable subjectivity on the one side and an unm asterable object on the other. T h e real world is irrational, beyond the mastery o f the subject, a sheer invisible trace o f resistance to the categories o f the understanding, which confront it in the m anner o f empty, abstract form s expelling som e brute facticity. T h e categories them selves are in this sense m odelled on the commodity form. In this situation, one can settle stoically for the irreducibility o f the real to thought, thus recognizing the limits o f one’s own subjectivity; or one

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can follow the path o f a H egel and seek to recuperate the material object itself within the mind. T h e former, Kantian strategy secures fo r the subject a real environment, but at the cost o f a curtailment o f its powers. O bjects indubitably exist, bu t they can never be fully appropriated. T h e latter, H egelian manoeuvre allows you fully to appropriate the object; but in what sense it is then truly an object is troublingly obscure. Expansive powers are secured for the subject, bu t at the risk o f dissolving away the objective realm which might guarantee them. O n ce again, however, the aesthetic is able to come to philosophy’s aid. F o r in the sphere o f aesthetic judgem ent, objects are uncovered which seem at once real yet wholly given for the subject, veritable bits o f material N ature which are nevertheless delightfully pliant to the mind. However contingent their existence, these objects display a form which is somehow mysteriously necessary, which hails and engages us with a grace quite unknown to the things in themselves, which merely turn their backs upon us. In the aesthetic representation, that is to say, we glimpse for an exhilarated moment the possibility o f a non-alienated object, one quite the reverse o f a commodity', which like the ‘auratic* phenomenon o f a W alter Benjamin returns our tender gaze and whispers that it was created for us alone.5 In another sen se, however, this formal, desensualized aesthetic object, which acts as a point o f exchange between subjects, can be read as a kind o f spiritualized version o f the very commodity it resists. D isplaced from the understanding, from the domains o f Nature and history, totality in K an t com es to take up its home instead in the realm o f practical reason. T o act morally for K an t is to set aside all desire, interest and inclination, identifying one’s rational will instead with a rule which one can propose to on eself as a universal law. What makes an action moral is som ething it m anifests over and above any particular quality or effect, namely its willed conformity to universal law. What is important is the act o f rationally willing the action as an end in itself. What we will when we act morally is the only thing o f absolute, unconditional worth: rational agency itself. We should be m oral because it is moral to be so.6 T o be free and rational - in short, to be a subject - m eans to be entirely self-determ ining, obeying only such laws as I propose to myself, and treating m yself and my action as an end rather than a

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m eans. Free subjectivity is thus a noumenal affair, quite absent from the phenomenal world. Freedom cannot b e directly captured in a concept or im age, and must be known practically rather than theoretically. I know I am free because I catch m yself acting that way o u t o f the co m er o f my eye. T h e moral subject inhabits the intelligible rather than material sphere, though it m ust constantly strive in m ysterious fashion to materialize its values in the actual world. H um an beings live simultaneously as free subjects and determined objects, slaves in N ature to laws which have no bearing on them in the spirit. Like the Freudian subject, the Kantian individual is radically ‘split’, though with a certain inversion: the world beyond appearances - the unconscious - is where for Freud we are m ost thoroughly determ ined, and the ‘phenomenal* sphere o f the ego the place where we can exert a frail degree o f will. T h e m aterial world for K an t is nothing like a subject, apparently inhospitable to freedom ; but it is the locus o f free subjects even so, who belong to it completely at one level and not at all at another. T h e subject for K ant, then, is everywhere free and everywhere in chains; and it is not difficult to decipher the social logic o f this contradiction. In class society, the subject’s exercise o f freedom is not only characteristically at the expense o f others’ oppression, but is gathered up into an anonymous, subjectless process o f cause and

effect which will finally come to confront the subject itself with all the dead weight o f a fatality or ‘second nature’ . In an eloquent passage, K arl M arx sketches as social contradiction what remains for K ant an unsurpassable conundrum in thought: In our days, everything seem s pregnant with its contrary. M achinery gifted with the wonderfiil pow er o f shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. T h e new-fangled sources o f wealth, by som e strange, weird spell, are turned into sources o f want. T h e victories o f art seem bought by the loss o f character. At the sam e pace that mankind m asters nature, man seem s to have becom e enslaved to other m en and to his own infamy. Even the pure light o f science seem s unable to shine but on the dark background o f ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life

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into a material force. T h is antagonism between m odem industry and science on the one hand, between misery and dissolution on the other; this antagonism between the productive forces and the social relations o f our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.7 In such conditions, freedom is bound to appear at once as the essence o f subjectivity and as utterly unfathomable, the dynamic o f history which is nowhere locatable in the material world, the condition o f all action which nevertheless cannot be represented within it. Freedom in such circum stances is strangely undecidable: that we must be free if all this has come about, yet that what com es about is the negation o f liberty, is the social correlative o f K an t’s philosophical double-think. M y freedom involves being treated by others as an end in myself; yet once I am established in that autonomy, I can then proceed in the real social world to strip those others o f their own equivalent independence. N oum enal and phenomenal realm s thus constantly undo each other, as the subject is tossed to and fro between them. Ju st as the Ding-ansich is the dark shadow thrown by the light o f phenomenal knowledge, so iron necessity is the secret underside o f liberty. It is not, as Kant believes, that we move in two simultaneous but incompatible worlds, but that our movement in the ghostly arena o f ‘noumenaP freedom is precisely the perpetual reproduction o f phenomenal enslavement, T h e subject lives not in divided and distinguished worlds but at the aporetic intersection o f the two, where blindness and insight, emancipation and subjection, are mutually constitutive. A lasdair M acIntyre has argued that the purely formal nature o f m oral judgem ent in such thinkers as K an t is the consequence o f a history in which moral questions have ceased to be intelligible against a settled background o f social roles and relations.8 In certain forms o f pre-bourgeois society, the question o f how a subject ought to behave is closely bound up with its location within the social structure, so that a sociological description o f the complex relations in which an individual stands would inescapably involve a normative discourse too. Certain rights, duties and obligations are internal to social functions, so that no firm distinction is possible between a sociological idiom o f fact and an ethical discourse o f value. Once the bourgeois social order begins to reify fact, and to construct a kind o f human subject transcendentally prior to its social relations, this historically

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grounded ethics is bound to enter into crisis. What one ought to do can no longer be deduced from what, socially and politically speaking, one actually is; a new distribution o f discourses accordingly comes about, in which a positivist language o f sociological description breaks loose from ethical evaluation. Ethical norms thus float free, breeding one or another form o f intuitionism, decisionism or finalism. I f one can return no social answer to the question o f how one ought to behave, then virtuous behaviour, for som e theorists at least, must becom e an end in itself. Sollen is removed from the sphere o f historical action and analysis; one must behave in a particular way sim ply because one must. T h e moral, that is to say, is tending towards the autotelic nature o f the aesthetic - or, what amounts to the sam e thing, the work o f art is now becom ing ideologically modelled on a certain self-referential conception o f ethical value. K ant has no truck with the heady Rom antic impulse to aestheticize morality: the moral law is a suprem e court o f appeal elevated above all mere beauty, even if that beauty is in som e sense a symbol o f it. What is right is by no means necessarily agreeable; indeed for the severely puritanical sage o f Königsberg there is a clear implication that the m ore we act against affective im pulse, the more morally admirable we becom e. B ut if the moral law is radically anti-aesthetic in content, dism issing all considerations o f happiness, spontaneity, benevolence and creative fulfilment for the single stark imperative o f duty, it nonetheless mimes the aesthetic in its form. Practical reason is wholly autonom ous and self-grounding, bears its ends within itself, spurns all vulgar utility and brooks no argum ent. A s with the work o f art, law and freedom are here at one: ou r subm ission to the moral law, K ant rem arks, is at once free, yet bound up with an unavoidable compulsion. It is in this sense, among others, that the moral and the aesthetic are for K ant somewhat analogous. While in the phenomenal realm we live subject to mechanical causality, our noumenal selves are sim ultaneously weaving behind or across this region som e awesome artefact or magnificent poem , as the free subject shapes its actions not in terms o f mechanical cause and effect but in relation to that teleological totality which is Reason. A truly free will is one determ ined only by its resolute orientation to this organic totality o f ends and to the requirem ent o f their harm onious unity, moving in a sphere where all instrumental adaptation o f m eans to ends has been

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transm uted into purposive or expressive activity. Any human act can be viewed simultaneously as conditioned by a causal chain o f events received from the past, and as directed towards future ends and their system atic coherence - viewed, that is to say, as phenomenal fact from the former perspective and as value from the latter.9 And this reconcilation o f ends and m eans in the kingdom o f Reason is also the construction o f a noumenal community o f free subjects, a realm o f norm s and persons rather than o f objects and desires, each o f whom is an end in h erself yet by that very fact integrally inserted into a total intelligible design. I f we live our lives at one level in material history, we live them at another level as part o f an organic artefact. N othing is more reprehensible, K an t protests in the Critique o f Pure Reason, than to seek to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what actually is done. Facts are one thing, and values another - which is to say that there is a gap, at once troubling and essential, between bourgeois social practice and the ideology o f that practice. T h e distinction between fact and value is here one between actual bourgeois social relations, and the ideal o f a community o f free rational subjects who treat one another as ends in themselves. You m ust not derive values from facts, from routine m arket-place practice, because i f you did you would end up with all the m ost undesirable kinds o f value: egoism, aggressiveness, mutual antagonism. Values do not flow from facts, in the sen se that ideologies are intended not simply to reflect existing social behaviour, but to mystify and legitimate it. A s such, values are indeed related to that behaviour, bu t in a disjunctive, contradictory way: the highly oblique affinities between bourgeois idealism and capitalist production are exactly their m ost significant interrelation, as the form er com es to ratify and dissem ble the latter. B ut if this hiatus is essential, it is also em barrassing. An ideology too feebly rooted in the actual will, as we have argued, always be politically vulnerable, and K an t’s noumenal sphere is in danger o f just this implausibility. I f it safeguards moral dignity from the m arket place, it does so only by removing it to a place so rem ote as to be effectively out o f sight. Freedom is so deeply the essen ce o f everything that it is nowhere to b e empirically found. It is not so much a praxis in the world as a transcendental viewpoint upon it, a way o f describing one’s condition which at once m akes all the difference and seem s to leave everything exactly as it was. It cannot directly show itself forth as it is, and ideology is precisely a matter o f

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sen suous representation. K ant is therefore in need o f a m ediatoiy zone which will bring this order o f pure intelligibility home to felt experience; and this, as we shall see, is one o f the m eanings o f the aesthetic. T h e qualities o f the Kantian moral law are those o f the commodity form . Abstract, universal and rigorously self-identical, the law o f R eason is a m echanism which, like the commodity, effects formally equal exchanges between isolated individual subjects, erasing the difference o f their needs and desires in its hom ogenizing injunctions. T h e Kantian community o f moral subjects is at one level a powerful critique o f actual m arket-place ethics: in this world, nobody is to be debased from a person to a thing. In its general form, however, that comm unity appears as an idealized version o f the abstract, serialized individuals o f bourgeois society, whose concrete distinctions are o f no account to the law which governs them. T h e equivalent o f this law in the discourse o f psychoanalysis is the transcendental signifier o f the phallus. Like the phallic signifier, the moral law subjects individuals to its rule, but brings them through that subjection to mature subjecthood. In K an t’s version o f affairs, it is a peculiarly censorious L aw or N am e-of-the-Father, the pure distilled essence o f authority: rather than telling us what to do, it merely intones ‘You m ust’.10 Its august aim is to persuade us to repress our sensual inclinations in the nam e o f its own higher imperatives; the law is what severs u s from N ature and relocates us in the symbolic order o f a suprasensible world, one o f pure intelligibilities rather than o f sensuous objects. T h e Kantian subject is accordingly split, one part o f it remaining forever entangled in the phenomenal order o f instinct and desire, the ‘id* o f the unregenerate ego, while the other clim bs upward and inward to higher things. Like the Freudian subject, the Kantian individual inhabits simultaneously two contradictory spheres, in which everything which is true o f the one is negated in the other. Everyone may p ossess the phallus, have access to rational freedom ; yet in another sense nobody does, since this phallic law o f reason does not exist. It is a fiction, this moral law, a hypothesis which we m ust construct in order to act as rational creatures at all, yet an entity o f which the world yields no trace o f evidence. T h e Kantian moral law is a fetish; and as such it is a poor basis for hum an solidarity, which is precisely its ideological paucity. In order to universalize my actions I m ust have regard to others, but only at the abstract level o f the

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understanding, not with any spontaneous sense o f their complex particular needs. K an t values the role o f culture in helping to develop the conditions for men and women to follow the moral law; but that law has too little regard in itself for m en and women’s concrete cultural existence. T h ere is a need, then, which neither politics nor morality can fulfil, to ‘promote a unity between individuals on the basis o f their subjectivity’;11 and it is this which the aesthetic can provide. I f the aesthetic is a vital register o f being, it is in part because o f the reified, abstract, individualist nature o f the moral and political spheres. Practical reason assures us that freedom is real; pure reason can never tell us what it is. T o explain how pure reason can be practical is, as K a n t dolefully comm ents, beyond the pow er o f human reason. All, however, is not lost. F o r there is after all a way in which N ature and reason may be harmonized, since there is a type o f contemplation which participates equally in the principle o f empirical explanation o f N ature and in the principle o f moral judgem ent. T here is a way o f viewing N ature such that the apparent lawfulness o f its forms might at least suggest the possibility o f ends in N ature which act in accordance with the ends o f human freedom. It is possible to look at the world as though it were itself a mysterious sort o f subject or artefact, governed like human subjects by a self-determ ining rational will. In the aesthetic and teleological m odes o f judgem ent, as presented in the Critique o f Judgm ent, the empirical world appears in its freedom , purposiveness, significant totality and self-regulating autonomy to conform to the ends o f practical reason. T h e pleasure o f the aesthetic is in part the surprise that this is the case. It is a delightful lucky chance that certain phenomena should seem to display a purposive unity, where such unity is not in fact deducible as necessary from logical prem ises. T h e occurrence seem s fortuitous, contingent and so not subsum able under a concept o f the understanding; but it nevertheless appears as if it could somehow be brought under such a concept, as i f it conform s spontaneously to som e law, even though we are quite unable to say what that law might be. I f there is no actual law to which we might subsum e this phenom enon, then the law in question seem s one inscribed in its very material form, inseparable from its unique particularity, a kind o f contingent or fortuitous lawfulness intuitively present to us in the

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thing but quite untheorizable. In the operations o f pure reason, we brin g a particular under a concept o f universal law, thus sliding its specificity beneath the general; in m atters o f practical reason we subordinate the particular to a universal maxim. In aesthetic judgem ent, however, we have the curious sense o f a lawful totality indissociable from our intuition o f the immediate form o f the thing. N ature appears animated by an indwelling finality which defeats the understanding; and this finality, in a pleasurable ambiguity, seem s at once a law to which the object conforms and nothing less than the irreducible structure o f the object itself. Sin ce aesthetic judgem ent does not engage any determinate concept, we are quite indifferent to the nature o f the object in question, or whether it even exists. B ut if the object does not in this sen se involve our cognition, it addresses itse lf to what we might call ou r capacity for cognition in general, revealing to us in a kind o f H eideggerian ‘pre-understanding’ that the world is the kind o f place we can in principle comprehend, that it is adapted to our minds even before any determinate act o f knowing has yet taken place. Som e o f the pleasure o f the aesthetic, then, arises from a quick sense o f the w orld’s delightful conformity to our capacities: instead o f pressing ahead to subsum e to som e concept the sensuous manifold we confront, we just reap enjoyment from the general formal possibility' o f doing so. T h e imagination creates a purposive synthesis, but without feeling the need for a theoretical detour. I f the aesthetic yields us no knowledge, then, it proffers us something arguably deeper: the consciousness, beyond all theoretical demonstration, that we are at home in the world because the world is somehow mysteriously designed to suit our capacities. Whether this is actually true or not we cannot say, since we can know nothing o f what reality is like in itself. T h at things are conveniently fashioned for our purposes m ust remain a hypothesis; but it is the kind o f heuristic fiction which perm its us a sense o f purposiveness, centredness and significance, and thus one which is o f the very essence o f the ideological. Aesthetic judgem ent is then a kind o f pleasurable free-wheeling o f ou r faculties, a kind o f parody o f conceptual understanding, a nonreferential pseudo-cognition which does not nail down the object to an identifiable thing, and so is agreeably free o f a certain material constraint. It is an undecidable half-way house between the uniform laws o f the understanding and som e utter chaotic indeterminacy - a

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kind o f dream or fantasy which displays its own curious lawfulness, bu t one o f the im age rather than the concept. Since the aesthetic representation is not passed through a determinate thought, we are able to savour its form free o f all hum drum material content - as in reading symbolist poetry, for example, we seem to be in the presence o f the pure eidetic form s o f language itself, purged o f any very determ inate sem antic substance. It is as though in aesthetic judgem ent we are grasping with out hands som e object we cannot see, not because we need to use it but simply to revel in its general graspability, in the way its convexity seem s to insinuate itself so pliantly into our palm s, delectably well designed as it appears for our prehensile powers. W hat we have in the aesthetic and teleological standpoints, then, is the consoling fantasy o f a material world which is perhaps not after all indifferent to us, which has a regard for our cognitive capacities. As one o f K an t’s commentators writes: It is a great stim ulus to moral effort and a strong support to the human spirit if men can believe that the moral life is som ething m ore than a mortal enterprise in which he can join with his fellow men against a background o f a blind and indifferent universe until he and the human race are blotted out forever. M an cannot b e indifferent to the possibility that his puny efforts towards moral perfection may, in spite o f appearances, be in accord with the purpose o f the universe . . . ,2 Part o f the traum a o f modernity is exactly this mind-shaking suspicion that the world is not enlistable on humanity’s side - that human values m ust resign themselves to being grounded in nothing more solid than themselves, and perhaps suffer a panic-stricken internal collapse on account o f this unnerving insight. F o r humanity to experience an exuberant sense o f its own unique status is to find itself tragically marooned from any amicably complicit N ature —from som e answ erable environment which might assure man that his purposes w ere valid because secretly part o f itself. F o r a social order to dem olish its own metaphysical foundation is to risk leaving its m eanings and values hanging in empty space, as gratuitous as any other structure o f meaning; and how then are the m em bers o f such an order to be persuaded o f its authority? T h e urge to coopt reality by

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theoretical violence into one’s own project may then prove well-nigh irresistible; but it is part o f K an t’s adm irable austerity, testimony to his sober, clear-eyed realism, that he cannot wholly follow this mythological path. T h ere is simply no verification in the procedures o f reason for any such speculative hypothesis. T h e re are, however, few graver threats to any ideology than its sen se o f reality’s stony indifference to its own values. Such steady recalcitrance on the world’s part is bound to throw the limits o f an ideology into harsh relief; and it is on a concealment o f such limits that ideologies flourish, in their impulse to eternalize and universalize them selves, to present themselves as unparented and bereft o f all siblings. T h e outrage which greeted the fiction o f T hom as Hardy in late nineteenth-century England may be tracked in the end simply to H ardy’s atheism : to his hard-headed refusal o f the consolations o f a collusive universe. By contrast, the desolate Tennyson o f In Memoriam struggles to wrench an insensate material world back into its proper imaginary place, as ally and support o f human endeavour. K an t sternly refuses to convert the heuristic fiction o f a purposive universe to ideological myth; but he cannot dispense with this imaginary dimension altogether, and it is this which the aesthetic provides. When the sm all infant o f Ja c q u e s L acan ’s celebrated ‘m irror stage’ encounters its reflection in the glass, it finds in this im age a plenitude lacking in its own body, and thus imputes to itself a fullness which in fact pertains to the representation. When the K antian subject o f taste encounters an object o f beauty, it discovers in it a unity and harmony which are in fact the effect o f the free play o f its own faculties. In both cases, an imaginary misrecognition takes place, although with a certain reversal o f subject and object from the m irror o f Lacan to the mirror o f K ant. T h e Kantian subject o f aesthetic judgem ent, who m isperceives as a quality o f the object what is in fact a pleasurable coordination o f its own powers, and who constitutes in a mechanistic world a figure o f idealized unity, resem bles the infantile narcissist o f the Lacanian mirror stage, whose m isperceptions L ouis Althusser has taught us to regard as an indispensable structure o f all ideology.u In the ‘imaginary’ o f ideology, or o f aesthetic taste, reality com es to seem totalized and purposive, reassuringly pliable to the centred subject, even though theoretical understanding may more bleakly inform us that this is a finality only with respect to the subject’s faculty o f cognition. T h e

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beauty or sublimity we perceive in aesthetic judgem ent is actually no m ore a property o f the object in question than the laws o f the understanding are a property o f N ature; rather, in K an t’s view, we ascribe to the object a felt harmony o f our own creative powers, in the Freudian mechanism known a s projection. It is as though we are constrained to invert K an t’s ‘C op em ican ’ priority o f subject and object, assigning to the object itself a pow er and plenitude which (so a m ore sober cognition informs us) belongs properly to ourselves alone. T h e sense that the object m akes consists entirely in the sense that it m akes for us. T h is theoretical insight, however, cannot undo our im aginary projections, which are not subject to the understanding; as in the thought o f Althusser, ‘theory’ and ‘ ideology9 lie on different planes, signify different registers, and to that extent do not interfere with one another even when they yield up mutually incompatible versions o f reality. A social formation as known to theoretical enquiry is fo r Althusser nothing like a human subject, lacks organic unity and is in no way ‘centred’ upon individuals; but it cannot succeed in reproducing itself unless those individuals are permitted the illusion that the world ‘hails’ them, shows som e regard for their faculties, ad d resses itself to them as one subject to another, and it is this fiction which ideology for Althusser exists to foster. F o r K ant, N ature is similarly nothing o f an organic subject; but it conforms to human understanding, and it is only a small step from this to the pleasurable fantasy (one required for coherent knowledge) that it was designed for such understanding too. T h e aesthetic is thus the wan hope, in an increasingly rationalized, secularized, demythologized environment, that ultimate purpose and m eaning may not be entirely lost. It is the m ode o f religious transcendence o f a rationalistic age - the place where those apparently arbitrary, subjectivist responses which fall outside the scope o f such rationalism may now be moved to the centre and granted all the dignity o f an eidetic form . T h at which is purely residual to bourgeois rationality, the je ne sais quoi o f taste, now com es to figure as nothing less than a parodie im age o f such thought, a caricature o f rational law. T h e m argins converge to the centre, since it is on those m argins that quasi-transcendental intuitions have been preserved without which that centre cannot prosper. It is as though the aesthetic represents som e residual feeling left over from an earlier social order, where a sense o f transcendental meaning and harmony, and o f the centrality o f the human subject, were still active. Such

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m etaphysical propositions cannot now withstand the critical force o f bourgeois rationalism, and so m ust be preserved in contentless, indeterm inate form, as structures o f feeling rather than system s o f doctrine. Unity, purpose and symmetry still exist, but they must now be thrust deep into the inwardness o f the subject itself, removed from the phenomenal world. T h is is not to concede, however, that they can have no influence on our conduct in that realm . F o r to entertain the hypothesis that reality is not altogether indifferent to our own moral capacities may quicken and renew our m oral consciousness, and so lead us to a finer form o f life. Beauty is in this sense an aid to virtue, appearing as it does to rally support for our moral endeavours from the unlikely resource o f N ature itself. W e should not, however, rejoice too soon in this apparent complicity o f the universe with our purposes. F o r all this, in the Kantian aesthetic, happens as though by som e felicitous accident. It is fortunate that the world’s diversity should seem so obediently com m ensurate with the mind’s powers; so that in the very act o f revelling in this apparent prearranged harmony, in this well-nigh m iraculous doubling o f the structure o f N ature and the structure o f the subject, we are at the sam e time wryly conscious o f its serendipity. Only in the aesthetic are we able to turn round upon ourselves, stand a little apart from our own vantage-point and begin to grasp the relation o f our capacitics to reality, in a m om ent o f wondering selfestrangem ent on which the Russian Form alists will later found an entire poetics. In the routinized, autom ated processes o f under­ standing, such wonder does not occur; in the aesthetic, by contrast, ou r faculties are suddenly foregrounded in ways which draw attention to their fittingness. But this is also to draw attention to their limitations. T o be allowed a rare experience o f our own peculiar point o f view is, after all, to sense that it is only our point o f view, and so one that might conceivably be transcended. In the presence o f beauty, we experience an exquisite sense o f adaptation o f the mind to reality; but in the turbulent presence o f the sublime we are forcibly reminded o f the limits o f our dwarfish imaginations and admonished that the world as infinite totality is not ours to know. It is as though in the sublim e the ‘real* itself - the eternal, ungraspable totality o f things inscribes itself as the cautionary limit o f all mere ideology, o f all com placent subject-centredness, causing us to feel the pain o f incompletion and unassuaged desire.

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Both o f these operations, the beautiful and the sublime, are in fact essential dim ensions o f ideology. F o r one problem o f all humanist ideology* is how its centring and consoling o f the subject is to be made compatible with a certain essential reverence and subm issiveness on the subject’s part. In making the world over to the subject, such hum anism risks undermining the censorious Other which will hold humanity humbly in its place. T h e sublim e in one o f its aspects is exactly this chastening, humiliating power, which decentres the subject into an awesome awareness o f its finitude, its own petty position in the universe, just as the experience o f beauty shores it up. M oreover, what would be threatened by a purely ‘imaginary’ ideology would be the subject’s desire as well as ils humility. T h e Kantian sublim e is in effect a kind o f unconscious process o f infinite desire, which like the Freudian unconscious continually risks swamping and overloading the pitiable ego with an excess o f affects. T h e subject o f the sublime is accordingly decentred, plunged into loss and pain, undergoes a crisis and fading o f identity; yet without this unwelcome violence we would never be stirred out o f ourselves, never prodded into enterprise and achievement. We would lapse back instead into the placid feminine enclosure o f the imaginary» where desire is captivated and suspended. K an t associates the sublime with the m asculine and the military, useful antidotes against a peace which breeds cowardice and effeminacy. Ideology must not so thoroughly centre the subject as to castrate its desire; instead we must be both cajoled and chastized, m ade to feel both hom eless and at home, folded upon the world yet reminded that our true resting place is in infinity. It is part o f the dialectic o f the beautiful and the sublime to achieve this double ideological effect. It is now alm ost a commonplace o f deconstructive thought to see the sublim e as a point o f fracture and fading, an abyssal undermining o f metaphysical certitudes; but while there is much o f value and interest in this view, it has served in effect to suppress just those m odes in which the sublim e also operates as a thoroughly ideological category. T h e psychoanalytic register o f the imaginary' involves a peculiarly intimate relation o f the infant to the mother’s body; and it is possible to catch a glim pse o f this body, suitably screened, in K ant’s aesthetic representation. What else, psychoanalytically speaking, is this beautiful object which is unique yet universal, wholly designed for the subject and addressed to its faculties, which in K an t’s interesting phrase

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‘relieves a want* and brings us a keenly pleasurable sense o f repletion, which is miraculously self-identical and which, though sensuously particular, evokes absolutely no libidinal impulse from the subject itself? T h e beautiful representation, like the body o f the mother, is an idealized material form safely defused o f sensuality and desire, with which, in a free play o f its faculties, the subject can happily sport. T h e bliss o f the aesthetic subject is the felicity o f the small child playing in the bosom o f the mother, enthralled by an utterly indivisible object which is at once intimate and indeterminate, brimming with purposive life yet plastic enough to put up no resistance to the subject’s own ends. T h e subject can find rest in this cloistral security, but its rest is stricdy temporary. F o r it is travelling to that higher location where it will find its true home, the phallic law o f abstract reason which quite transcends the sensible. T o attain full moral stature we must be w renched from the maternal pleasures o f N ature and experience in the majesty' o f the sublim e the sense o f an infinite totality' to which our feeble imaginations will never be equal.14 Yet in the very moment o f bein g thus subdued, sharply recalled to ou r true finitude, we know a new kind o f exultant power. When the imagination is forced up traumatically against its own limits, it finds itself straining beyond them in a movement o f negative transcendence; and the giddy feeling o f unboundedness which then results yields us a negative presentation o f the infinity o f moral Reason. In the sublim e, morality and feeling for once come together, but in negative style: what we feel is how im m easurably R eason transcends the sen ses, and thus how radically ‘unaesthetic* our true freedom, dignity and autonomy are. M orality is ‘aestheticized* in the sublim e as feeling, bu t as a feeling which, since it denigrates the sensory, is also ‘anti-aesthetic*. Hurled beyond our own sensuous limits, we grasp som e dim notion o f the suprasensory, which is nothing less than the law o f R eason inscribed within us. T h e pain we experience under the weight o f the paternal law is thus shot through with a sense o f exaltation above all merely conditioned being: we know that the sublime presentation is simply an echo o f the sublimity o f R eason within ourselves, and thus testimony to our absolute freedom . In this sense, the sublim e is a kind o f anti-aesthetic which p resses the imagination to extreme crisis, to the point o f failure and breakdown, in order that it may negatively figure forth the R eason that transcends it. At the very moment this immensity o f

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R eason threatens to overpower us, we are aware o f its inscrutable imprint within ourselves. I f there is finally no reason to fear the punitive phallic law o f the father, it is because each o f us carries the phallus securely lodged within ourselves. T h e subject o f the imaginary, who imputes a fetishistic power to the object, must so to speak come to its senses, undo this projection and recognize that this pow er resides in it rather than in the object. It thus exchanges the fetish o f the mother’s body for the fetish o f the phallic law, trading one absolute self-identity for another; but its reward for thus subm itting to the pains o f castration will be a kind o f reconstitution o f the imaginary at a higher level, as it comes to perceive that the infinity it fears in the sublime representation is in fact an infinite power within itself. T h is daunting totality is not ours to know, and to this extent the reverence and humility o f the subject are preserved; but it is ours to feel, and to that degree the subject’s autonomy is gratifyingly confirmed. T h e re is a difficult tension within bourgeois society between the ideology o f production and the ideology o f consumption. Since the form er realm is generally unpleasant, sanctions and disciplines are required for the subject to buckle itself to its tasks. T h ere is no suggestion that this world o f production exists for the subject; but things are different in the arena o f consumption, where the commodity 'hails’ the individual and implies a special relationship with him. ‘I f the soul o f the commodity which M arx occasionally m entions in jest existed,’ writes W alter Benjam in, ‘it would be the m ost empathetic ever encountered in the realm o f souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.’15 Like K an t’s aesthetic object, the commodity would seem designed especially for our faculties, addressed to us in its very being. Viewed from the standpoint o f consumption, the world is uniquely ours, shaped to nestle in our palm s; seen from the standpoint o f production it appears, like Kantian N ature, as an impersonal domain o f causal processes and autonom ous laws. Capitalism continually centres the subject in the sphere o f values, only to decentre it in the realm o f things. O ne can trace something o f this movement in the dialectic o f the beautiful and the sublime. I f things-in-themselves are beyond the reach o f the subject, the beautiful will rectify this alienation by presenting reality, for a precious moment, as given spontaneously for that subject’s powers. I f this then seem s likely to

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breed complacency, the sublime is always on hand with its intimidatory power; but the dangerously demoralizing effects o f such pow er are in turn tempered by the subject’s joyful consciousness that the power in question is that o f its own m ajestic Reason. A esthetic judgem ents, Kant argues in the Critique o f Judgement, are at once subjective and universal. T hey thus figure as the joker in the pack o f his theoretical system, since it is hard to see on K an t’s terms how the phrase ‘aesthetic judgem ent’ can be other than oxymoronic how som ething can be at once a judgement, which involves subsum ing particulars to a law o f the understanding, and yet no more than a feeling. T h e grammatical form o f aesthetic judgem ents, Kant claim s, is in fact deceptive and duplicitous. In such statements as ‘I am beautiful’, ‘You are sublime’, the adjectives would appear to be predicative, but this is really an illusion: such propositions have the form , but not the real force, o f referential utterances. T o claim that you are sublime is not for me to identify som e property in you but to report on som e feeling in myself. Judgem en ts o f taste appear to be descriptions o f the world but are in fact concealed emotive utterances, perform atives m asquerading as constatives. T h e grammaticality o f such enunciations is at odds with their true logical status. It would, however, be quite impermissable to decode the pseudo-proposition \r is beautiful’ as ‘I like x \ since judgem ents o f taste are for K an t purely disinterested and have nothing to do with one’s contingent inclinations or desires. Such judgem ents are certainly subjective; but they are so purely subjective, so expressive o f the very essence o f the subject, untainted by idiosyncratic prejudice and ‘ devoid o f every possible condition which would necessarily distinguish the judge from other people’, 16 that it is possible to speak o f them also as universal. I f the subject transcends its ephemeral needs and desires, then a truly subjective judgem ent disregards all the accidents which divide one individual from another and strikes an immediate chord in them all. Aesthetic judgem ents are thus, as it were, ‘impersonally personal’,17 a kind o f subjectivity without a subject or, as K ant has it, a ‘universal subjectivity’. T o judge aesthetically is implicitly to declare that a wholly subjective response is o f the kind that every individual must necessarily experience, one that must elicit spontaneous agreement from them all. T h e aesthetic, one might argue, is in this sense the very paradigm

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o f the ideological. F o r the peculiarity o f ideological propositions m ight be sum marized by claiming, with som e exaggeration, that there is in fact no such thing as an ideological proposition. Like aesthetic judgem ents for K ant, ideological utterances conceal an essentially emotive content within a referential form, characterizing the lived relation o f a speaker to the world in the act o f appearing to characterize the world. T h is is not to suggest that ideological discourses do not in fact contain referential propositions which may be assessed as either true or false, simply that this is not what is m ost specific about the ideological. Ideology docs indeed importantly contain many false propositions, such as the claim that Asians are inferior to Europeans or that the Q ueen o f England is highly intelligent; but the falsity o f such claims is not what is peculiarly ideological about them, since not all false propositions are ideological and not all ideological statements are false. What makes such false claim s ideological is the motivation o f their falsity: the fact that they encode emotive attitudes relevant to the reproduction o f social power. T h e sam e is true o f the many ideological utterances which happen to be true, such as the claim that the Q ueen o f England takes her job seriously and is devoted to her work. Ideology cannot primarily be characterized in terms o f false statements, not, as som e have held, because it does not contain more than its fair share o f them, but because it is not at root a question o f propositionality at all. It is a m atter o f wishing, cursing, fearing, reverencing, desiring, denigrating and so on - performative discourse, which like K ant’s aesthetic judgem ents does not rest upon conceptual categories o f truth or falsehood, even if it significandy involves them. T h e statement ‘T h e Irish are inferior to the British’ is a pseudo-referential encodem ent o f the imperative: ‘Down with the Irish!’ T h is is one reason why it is notoriously difficult to argue with. T h e aesthetic in K an t short-circuits the conceptual to link concrete particulars in their very immediacy to a kind o f universal law, but a law which can be in no sense formulated. In the aesthetic, in contrast to the dom ains o f pure and practical reason, the individual is not abstracted to the universal but is somehow raised to the universal in its very particularity, manifesting it spontaneously on its surface. ‘In the phenomenon o f the beautiful the inconceivable thing happens, that in contemplating beauty every subject remains in itself and is purely immersed in its own state, while at the sam e time it is absolved

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o f all contingent particularity and knows itself to be the bearer o f a total feeling which no longer belongs to “ this” or “ that” .’ 18 T h e ideological viewpoint, somewhat similarly, is at once wholly my own and an utterly subjectless truth - at once constitutive o f the very depths o f the subject, who will from time to time fight and die for it, and a sort o f universal law, though one which seem s so self-evidently inscribed in the very material phenomena themselves as to be quite untheorizable. In ideology and the aesthetic we stay with the thing itself, which is preserved in all o f its concrete materiality rather than dissolved to its abstract conditions; yet this very materiality, this uniquely unrepeatable form or body, com es mysteriously to assum e all the compelling logic o f a global decree. T h e ideologico-aesthetic is that indeterminate region, stranded somewhere between the empirical and theoretical, in which abstractions seem flushed with irreducible specificity and accidental particulars raised to pseudo-cognitive status. T h e loose contingencies o f subjective experience are imbued with the binding force o f law, but a law which can never be known in abstraction from them. Ideology constantly offers to go beyond the concrete to some debatable proposition, but that proposition constantly eludes formulation and disappears back into the things themselves. In this peculiar condition o f being, the individual subject becom es the bearer o f a universal, ineluctable structure which im presses itself upon it as the very essence o f its identity. W hat is from one standpoint an absolute impersonal rightness is from another standpoint just som ething one happens to feel; but that ‘happens’ is somehow unavoidable. Ideology is on the one hand an ‘everybody knows’, a ragbag o f tarnished adages; but this reach-m e-dow n assem blage o f tags and clichés is forceful enough to impel the subject to murder or martyrdom, so deeply does it engage the roots o f a unique identity. J u s t as it is illicit in K an t’s view to decode the statement ‘x is beautiful’ as *1 like so it would be clearly inadequate to translate the proposition ‘T h e Irish are inferior to the British’ as *1 don’t like the Irish’. I f ideology were merely a question o f such incidental prejudices, then it would no doubt be somewhat easier to uproot than it is. T h e rhetorical move which converts an emotive utterance to the gram m atical form o f the referential is an index o f the fact that certain attitudes are at once ‘merely subjective’ and somehow necessary. In this sense, surprisingly enough, Kantian aesthetics move us a little

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way towards a materialist understanding o f ideology. T hey define a third realm, between those propositions o f theoretical reason which do not necessarily engage subjectivity at all (‘two plus two equals four’), and mere whimsical predilections. Given the nature o f our im m utable faculties, K ant holds, it is necessary that certain subjective judgem ents elicit the universal consent o f others, since these judgem ents arise from the sheer formal workings o f capacities we have in common. Given certain m aterial conditions, one might similarly claim, it is necessary that certain subjective responses be invested with all the force o f universally binding propositions, and this is the sphere o f the ideological. In the business o f aesthetic judgem ent, the nature or even existence o f the referent is a matter o f indifference, just as ideology is not primarily a question o f the truth o f certain determinate propositions. T h e real object m akes its appearance in the aesthetic sim ply as an occasion for the pleasurable harmonization o f our faculties. T h e universal quality o f taste cannot spring from the object, which is purely contingent, or from any particular desire or interest o f the subject, which are similarly parochial; so it must be a matter o f the very cognitive structure o f the subject itself, which is presum ed to be invariable am ong all individuals. Part o f what we enjoy in the aesthetic, then, is the knowledge that our very structural constitution

as hum an subjects predisposes us to m utual harmony. It is as though, prior to any determinate dialogue or debate, we are always already in agreem ent, fashioned to concur; and the aesthetic is this experience o f pure contendess consensus where we find ourselves spontaneously at one without necessarily even knowing what, referentially speaking, we are agreeing over. Once any determinate concept is removed from ou r grasp, we are left delighting in nothing but a universal solidarity beyond all vulgar utility. Su ch solidarity is a kind o f saisus communis, which K an t opposes in his work to that fragmentary, unreflective collection o f prejudices and opinions which is doxa or common sense. Su ch doxa is what K an t himself, had he used the word, might have termed ‘ideology*; but scnsus communis is ideology purified, universalized and rendered reflective, ideology raised to the second power, idealized beyond all mere sectarian prejudice or customary reflex to resem ble the very ghosdy shape o f rationality itself. T o establish itself as a truly universal class, the bourgeoisie will need to do more than trade in a handful o f tattered maxims: its governing ideology must

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m anifest at once the universal form o f the rational and the apodictic content o f the affectively immediate. W hat aesthetic judgem ent signifies for K an t is essentially a form o f altruism . In responding to an artefact, or to natural beauty, I place my own contingent aversions and appetencies in brackets, putting m yself instead in everyone else*s place and thus judging from the standpoint o f a universal subjectivity. A portrait o f cheese is not beautiful because I happen to enjoy eating the stuff. In this sense, the Kantian aesthetic challenges and confirms class-society at a stroke. On the one hand, its Olympian disinterestedness is at odds with what Kant calls ‘truculent egoism*, the routine selfish interests o f social life. Aesthetic intersubjectivity adum brates a utopian community o f subjects, united in the very deep structure o f their being. 'H ie cultural dom ain is in this sense for K ant distinct from the political, where individuals are bound together in purely external fashion for the ins trumental pursuit o f ends. Such merely e xtrinsic solidarity involves the ultimate back-up o f coercion: social life would ultimately collapse, K an t holds, if public standards were not violently enforceable. T h e cultural domain, by contrast, is one o f non-coercive consensus; it is o f the essence o f aesthetic judgem ents that they cannot be compelled. ‘C ulture’ thus prom otes an inward, unconstrained unity between citizens on the basis o f their most intimate subjectivity. In this ethicoaesthetic sphere, ‘no mem ber shall be a mere m eans, but should also be an end, and seeing that he contributes to the possibility o f the entire body, should have his position and function defined by the idea o f the whole’ .19 Politics is restricted to public, utilitarian behaviour, m arked o ff from that ‘inner, personal interrelation between subjects as rational and feeling beings* which is the aesthetic.2” If culture thus sketches the ghostly oudine o f a non-dominative social order, it does so by mystifying and legitimating actual dominative social relations. T h e division between the phenomenal and the noumenal is, so to speak, politicized, installed as an essential fissure within social life itself. K an t’s highly formalistic ethics prove incapable o f generating any distinctive political theory o f their own beyond a conventional liberalism; and though such ethics proffer the dream o f a community where subjects are ends in themselves, they are finally too abstract to bring this ideal home to felt experience. It is this which the aesthetic is uniquely able to provide; but in doing so it reproduces something o f the very social logic it is out to resist. K ant’ s selfless aesthetic judge.

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absolved from all sensual motivation, is among other things a spiritualized version o f the abstract, serialized subject o f the m arket place, who cancels the concrete differences between him self and others as thoroughly as does the levelling, homogenizing commodity. In matters o f taste, as o f commodity transactions, all individuals are indifferently exchangeable; and culture is thus part o f the problem to which it offers itself as a solution. T h e critical philosophy, and the concept o f ideology, are bom at the sam e historical moment, as M ichel Foucault notes in The Order o f Things.2' But whereas, as Foucault argues, the science o f ideology in the hands o f its founder, D estutt de T racy, rests content with the business o f representations, patiently examining the laws which organize them, the Kantian critique p resses beyond this purely phenom enal space (ideology, T racy remarks, is ‘a part o f zoology’) to enquire into the very transcendental conditions o f such representation, its object now nothing less than representability itself. What will then em erge is the ambivalendy inspiring and alarm ing truth that all that is m ost precious falls outside the representational sphere. I f this preserves what is m ost valuable from succum bing to the determined status o f apples and armchairs, it also threatens to strike vacuous the very essence o f the human subject. I f freedom is finally unrepresent­ able, how is it to exert its ideological force, given that ideology is itself a question o f representation? A way must consequently be found o f im agining such liberty non-reductively in the empirical world, and this is one function o f the Kantian aesthetic. T h e aesthetic is the reflection in the lower world o f the higher, the place where that which finally outstrips representation altogether, a s the sublime reminds us, m anages nevertheless to achieve som e sensuous embodiment or analogy. Humanity would see a sign; and the beautiful and the sublim e conveniently supply it. W e have seen that the aesthetic in K an t fulfils a multitude o f functions. It centres the human subject in an imaginary relation to a pliable, purposive reality, thereby granting it a delightful sense o f its own inner coherence and confirming its status as an ethical agent. Yet it d ocs this without ceasing to discipline and chastise the subject, recalling it to a piously submissive awareness o f the infinity where it truly belongs. It ensures between human subjects a spontaneous, im m ediate, non-coercive consensus, providing the affective bonds

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which traverse the alienations o f social life. It brings individuals home to each other as immediate experience, in a discourse o f concrete particularity which has all the irrefragable form o f a rational law but none o f its rebarbative abstraction. It allows specific and universal mysteriously to coalesce, without need o f conceptual mediation, and thus inscribes a global imperative on the body o f the sensuously given in the m anner o f an hegemonic rather than a tyrannical authority*. Finally, it offers an image o f sheer self-determ ining autonomy, in which N ature, the conditioned and determined, is subtly alchemized into purposive freedom , and iron necessity miraculously reappears as absolute self-government. It thus offers an ideological paradigm for both individual subject and social order - for the aesthetic representation is a society, in which each constituent component is the condition o f the purposive existence o f every' other, and finds in that felicitous totality the ground o f its own identity. In the light o f this theory, it is difficult not to feel that many traditional debates about the relations between the aesthetic and the ideological - as reflection, production, transcendence, estrangement and so on - have been somewhat superfluous. From one viewpoint, the aesthetic is the ideological. But to claim that the reconciliation o f freedom and necessity, se lf and others, spirit and N ature lies in the aesthetic is tantamount to confessing, gloomily enough, that it is hardly anywhere to be found. T h is triumphant resolution o f social contradictions depends on an activity for which, as K arl M arx wryly com m ented, the middle class has exceedingly little time. What m atters is less art than aesthetics]; indeed when T h eodor Adorno rem arked in 1970 that ‘Aesthetics today is powerless to avert its becom ing a necrologue o f art,’22 it is only that ‘today* that one might query. A double displacem ent occurs in the Enlightenment, from cultural production as such to a particular ideology o f the artefact, and from that to ideology in general. F o r it is clear that what the ruling order requires is nothing as anaemically intellectualist as D estutt de T racy’s ‘science o f ideas*, bu t a theory o f ideological practice - a formalization o f that which in its spontaneous immediacy w ould seem to evade the concept. I f the ideological is primarily a question o f feeling, then the aesthetic can m odel it a good deal more effectively than zoology. I f formalizing the non-discursive would seem a peculiarly self-defeating project - i f there is an oxymoronic rin g to the very phrase ‘theoty o f ideology* - then the most

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appropriate sign o f this impossibility is the m ysteriousness o f art itself, which is and is not a rule-governed realm. T h e re is no reason to suppose, however, that ‘ideology’ need always be a pejorative term, and that the aesthetic stands unequivocally on the side o f social oppression. Against a social philosophy founded upon egoism and appetite, K ant speaks up for a generous vision o f a community o f ends, finding in the freedom and autonomy o f the aesthetic a prototype o f human possibility' equally at odds with feudal absolutism and possessive individualism. I f there is no way in which this admirable ideal o f mutual respect, equality and com passion can enter upon material reality, if it is necessary to rehearse in the mind what cannot be enacted in the world, this is hardly the responsibility o f K an t himself. It is within this bold vision that M arx’s immanent critique will find a foothold, enquiring how it com es about that such dream s o f freedom and moral dignity succeed in reproducing the conditions o f violence and exploitation. ‘In art, like everywhere else,* writes Adorno o f idealist aesthetics, ‘nothing deserved respect unless it owed its existence to the autonom ous subject. What was valid and true about this for the subject was invalid and untrue for the non-subjective other: freedom for the former was unfreedom for the latter.’23 K ant’s own desperate solution to this dilemma w as to split the subject down the middle, secreting its liberty at such an unsearchable depth that it becom es at once inviolable and ineffectual. Such a radical division o f actual and ideal, however, will prove a constant source o f ideological em barrassm ent; and it will be left to H egel to draw the two realms together by the discourse o f dialectics.

Notes 1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca and London, 1981), p. 251. 2 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics 11:2 (1981). It is fair to add that Kant would no doubt have thought this need to figure the nonphcnomenal in phenomenal terms entirely inevitable. 3 Sec Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London, 1971), pp. 114-34. See also Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant (London, 1971). 4 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousnessy p. 121.

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5 See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973), p. 55. 6 See Charles Taylor, ‘Kant’s Theory of Freedom’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1985). 7 Karl Marx, The People's Paper (19 April 1856). For an account of Kant's own political views, see Howard Williams, Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1983). 8 See Alasdair MacIntyre,/! Short History o f Ethics (London, 1967), and After Virtue (London, 1981). 9 See Ernst Cassirer, Kants Life and Thought (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 246-7. 10 Sigmund Freud comments in 4The Economic Problem of Masochism’ that Kant’s categorical imperative ‘is . . . a direct inheritance from the Oedipus complex’ (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, cd. J. Strachey (London, 1955-74), vol. XIX, p. 169. 11 Salim Kemal, Kant and Fine Art (Oxford, 1986), p. 76. 12 H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (Lon don, 1947), p. 256. 13 Sec Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, in Écrits: A Selection (London, 1977), and Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971). 14 For useful accounts of the sublime, see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore and London, 1976), Pan 2, and Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 50-2. Other studies o f Kant’s aesthetics are Donald W. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Madison, 1974); F. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason (Pittsburgh, 1974); Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims o f Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Eva Schapcr, Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh, 1979); and P. van De Pitte, Kant as Philosophical Anthropologist (The Hague, 1971). Two hostile accounts o f Kantian aesthetics are D. S. Miall, ‘Kant’s Critique o f Judgement: A Biased Aesthetic’ , British Journal ofAesthetics, vol. 20, no. 2 (1980), and Karl Ameriks, ‘Kant and the Objectivity of Taste’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23, no. 1 (1983). 15 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 55. 16 T ed Cohen and Paul Guyer, Introduction to Cohen and Guyer (eds), Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago, 1982), p. 12. 17 Ibid. 18 Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought p. 318. 19 Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford, 1952), Pan 2, p. 23n. 20 Kemal, Kant ami Fine Art p. 76. 21 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1973), chapter 7. 22 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), p. 5. 23 Ibid., p. 92.

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K an t’s rigorous duality o f cognition and aesthetic judgem ent contains the seed s o f its own deconstruction, as som e o f his successors were not slow to recognize. F o r if the aesthetic denotes the reference o f an object to a subject, then it m ust, as K ant acknowledges, be present as a moment o f all our knowledge. It is a necessary supposition o f all our investigation o f Nature that N ature is structured for, or ‘shows som e regard for’, our cognitive faculties. K an t’s ‘C opem ician revolution’ in thought centres the world upon the human subject, and by doing so lends itself inherently to the aesthetic, m aking that whole register o f experience seem less marginal, gratuitous or supplementary than it m ight otherwise appear. T h e harmony o f faculties which is aesthetic pleasure is in fact a harmony requisite for every empirical cognition; so that i f the aesthetic is in a sense ‘supplementary’ to our other activities o f mind, it is a supplem ent which turns out by som e D erridean logic to be more like their foundation or precondition. As G illes D eleuze argues, ‘A faculty would never take on a legislative and determining role were not all the faculties together capable o f this free subjective harmony [of the aesthetic].*1 T h e root o f all knowledge for K ant, a s John M acM urray has pointed out, is the productive imagination; and this m eans to say that Kantian knowledge is always in som e sen se fictional.2 T h is incipient aestheticization o f cognition, however, m ust be strictly curbed, lest rationality collapse into Romantic excess; and for K an t to claim that the aesthetic does not involve determinate concepts is thus as much to safeguard rationality from this unsettling parody o f itself as to account for its peculiar m ode o f working. T h e danger is that o f identifying

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truth with what is satisfying to the mind, as the danger in the domain o f ethics is to equate the good simply with what is creatively fulfilling. S u ch hedonism is deeply offensive to K an t’s puritan austerity: truth and goodness are not so glibly come by, but require discipline and exertion. Yet practical reason, in its absolutely self-determining, self­ grounding character, already resem bles an ‘ aesthetic* phenomenon o f a kind; and it will thus always be possible for others to conflate the two dim ensions. T h e aesthetic is therefore a perilously ambivalent object for bourgeois society. On the one hand, in its subject­ centredness, universality, spontaneous consensuality, intimacy, harmony and purposiveness, it offers to cater fo r som e o f that society’s ideological needs superbly well; but it threatens on the other hand to escalate uncontrollably beyond this function to undercut the very foundations o f rationality and moral duty. T aste , at one level sharply separate from truth and morality, seem s at another level their very b asis; and the terms are thus ripe for a deconstruction which will license som e Romanticism to aestheticize the whole o f reality. B ourgeois thought would seem confronted with an unenviable choice between preserving its rationality only at the cost o f marginalizing an ideologically fruitful mode, and cultivating that mode to the point where it threatens to usurp truth and virtue themselves. It might be claimed that Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education o f M an advances som e way towards such a deconstruction, remaining within a Kantian problematic it simultaneously interrogates. If K a n t has too severely dislocated N ature and reason, Schiller will define the aesthetic as exactly the hinge or transitional stage between the brutely sensual and the sublimely rational. In the form o f the socalled ‘play drive’, the aesthetic condition reconciles the sense drive the changing, shapeless, appetitive stu ff o f sensation and desire - with the formal drive, the active, shaping, immutable force o f Kantian reason. ‘T h e [sense drive]’, writes Schiller, insists upon absolute reality: [man] is to turn everything which is m ere form into world, and make all his potentialities fully manifest. T h e [form al drive] insists upon absolute formality: he is to destroy everything in h im self which is m ere world, and bring harmony into all his changes. In other words, he is to externalise all that is within him, and give form to all that is outside him.3

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W hat brings about this resolution o f sense and spirit, matter and form , change and perm anence, finitude and infinity, is the aesthetic, an epistemological category which Schiller has now thoroughly anthropologized. T h e aesthetic, however, is simply a way-stage or passage to the non-sensuous imperatives o f practical reason, which Schiller as a good enough Kantian fully endorses. T h e re is no question, it would seem , o f his aestheticizing truth and morality out o f existence: they remain humanity’s loftiest goals, but goals which appear somewhat absolutist and unfeeling in their dem ands on sensual human nature. O ne can read Schiller’s text, that is to say, a s an essential softening up o f K an t’s imperious superego o f reason, a tem pering which carries its own ideological necessity. F o r if reason is simply at war with the flesh, how is it ever to take root in the body o f lived experience? How is ‘theory’ to flesh itself out as ‘ ideology’? Sch iller is writing with the sound o f French revolutionary T error in his ears, which might suggest one reason why he believes abstract reason to stand in need o f a little com passionate moderation; but the ideological dilemma he confronts is in fact more general than this. R eason will only secure its sway if it is, in G ram scian terms, consensual rather than bluntly coercive; it must achieve hegemony in collusion with the senses it subdu es, rather than trampling roughshod over them. T h e Kantian duality o f N ature and reason simply short-circuits what we might call the question o f ideological reconstruction, leaving us with little clue as to how we are to leap from the one realm to the other. Schiller, for his part, recognizes that this tension between absolute ethical injunctions, and the sordid sublunary state o f bourgeois nature, must be at once sustained and relaxed; and the aesthetic is the category which will perform this difficult double operation. We shall see, however, that it succeeds in darkening the question o f the transition from N ature to reason as much a s illuminating it. A s a progressive refinement o f sensation and desire, the aesthetic accom plishes a kind o f deconstruction: it breaks down the tyrannical dominion o f the sense drive not by the imposition o f som e external ukase, but from within. ‘Through the aesthetic modulation o f the psyche, then, the autonomy o f reason is already opened up within the dom ain o f sense itself, the dominion o f sensation already broken within its own frontiers, and physical man refined to the point where spiritual man only needs to start developing out o f the physical

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according to the laws o f freedom* (163). O n the terrain o f the aesthetic, humanity must 4play the war against M atter into the very territory o f M atter itself, so that [it] may be spared having to fight his dread foe on the sacred soil o f Freedom * (169). It is easier, in other w ords, for reason to regulate sensuous N ature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside; and it is precisely this which the aesthetic interplay o f spirit and sense will achieve. T h e aesthetic perform s in this sense an essentially propaedeutic role, processin g and defusing the raw stu ff o f sensational life for its eventual subjugation at the hands o f reason. It is as though, in the aesthetic, reason plays along with the sen ses, inscribes them formally from the inside as a kind o f fifth colum nist in the enemy camp, thereby rehearsing us in those higher states o f truth and goodness towards which we are travelling. Otherwise, as creatures sunk degenerately in our desires, we are likely to experience the dictates o f reason as unpleasandy absolutist and arbitrary, and so fail to comply with them. Schiller shrewdly recognizes that Kant’s starkly deontological decrees are by no m eans the m ost effective ideological mechanism for subjugating a recalcitrant material world; K an t’s Duty, like som e paranoid absolutist monarch, reveals too little trust in the m asses’ generous instincts for conformity to it. T h is churlishly suspicious despot thus needs a touch o f populist sympathy if its hegemony is to be ensured: ‘Duty, stem voice o f N ecessity, must moderate the censorious tone o f its precepts - a tone only justified by the resistance they encounter - and show greater respect for N ature through a nobler confidence in her willingness to obey them’ (217). Duty m ust engage more closely with inclination: that moral character is defective which can assert itself only by sacrificing the natural, just as ‘a political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to achieve unity only by suppressing variety* (19). T h e political allusion is apposite, since there is no doubt that the ‘sense drive* for Sch iller directly evokes appetitive individualism. H is uncultivated ‘savage’, ‘self-seeking, and yet without a S e lf; lawless, yet without Freedom * (171), is no exotic tribal specim en but the average Germ an m iddle-class philistine, who sees in N ature’s splendid profusion nothing but his own prey, and either devours its objects in an access o f desire or thrusts them horrifiedly aside when they threaten to destroy him. T h e sense drive is also the proletariat, with its ‘crude, law less instincts, unleashed with the loosening o f the bonds o f civil

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order, and hastening with ungovernable fury to their animal satisfactions’ (25). W hat Schiller terms the ‘aesthetic modulation o f the psyche’ in fact denotes a project o f fundamental ideological reconstruction. T he aesthetic is the m issing mediation between a barbaric civil society given over to pure appetite, and the ideal o f a well-ordered political state: ‘if man is ever to solve that problem o f politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem o f the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom * (9). Every progressive politics will founder as surely a s Jacobinism if it fails to take a detour through the psychical and address itself to the problem o f transforming the human subject. Schiller*s ‘aesthetic’ is in this sense G ram sci’s ‘hegemony’ in a different key, and both concepts are brought to political birth by the dismal collapse o f revolutionary hopes. T h e only politics that will hold is one firmly rooted in a refashioned ‘culture’ and a revolutionized subjectivity. T h e aesthetic will leave humanity, not free, moral and truthful, but inherently ready to receive and respond to these rational imperatives: ‘although this [aesthetic] state can o f itself decide nothing as regards either our insights or our convictions, thus leaving both our intellectual and our moral worth as yet entirely problematic, it is nevertheless the necessary pre-condition o f our attaining to any insight or conviction at all. In a word, there is no other way o f making sen suous man rational except by first making him aesthetic’ (161). Uneasily conscious that this might seem to make reason slavishly dependent upon sensuous representation, thus undermining its selfvalidatory power, Schiller swerves instantly back to Kantian orthodoxy: ‘Should truth and duty not be able, o f and by themselves alone, to gain access to sensuous man? T o which I m ust an sw er they not only can, they positively must, owe their determining power to themselves alone . . .* (161). Beauty imparts the power to think and decide, and in this sense underlies truth and morality; but it has no say at all in the actual uses o f these powers, which are consequently self-determining. T h e aesthetic is the matrix o f thought and action, but exercises no dom inion over that to which it gives birth; far from hubristically usurping the role o f reason, it simply sm ooths the path for its august appearance. It is not quite, however, a ladder which we climb only to kick away; for though the aesthetic is the m ere precondition o f truth and virtue, it nevertheless somehow prefigures what it will produce.

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T ru th is by no m eans beauty, so Schiller stoutly maintains against the aestheticizers; but beauty nonetheless in principle contains i t A narrow pathway can thus be opened up between K an t's disabling duality o f faculties on the one hand, and som e aestheticist conflation o f them on the other. W hat does it mean to claim that the aesthetic is the essential precondition o f the moral? It m eans, more or less, that in this peculiar condition the rigorous determination o f the sense drive, and the equally despotic power o f the formal drive, play ceaselessly into one other and so succeed in cancelling out each other’s pressures, thus leaving us in a state o f negative freedom or ‘ free determinability’. ‘T o the extent that [the play driv e] deprives feelings and passions o f their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas o f reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws o f reason o f their m oral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests o f the sen ses* (99). T h e aesthetic is a kind o f fictive or heuristic realm in which we can suspend the force o f our usual powers, imaginatively transferring qualities from one drive to another in a kind o f free­ w heeling experiment o f the mind. Having momentarily disconnected these drives from their real-life contexts, w e can enjoy the fantasy o f reconstituting each by m eans o f the other, reconstructing psychical conflict in term s o f its potential resolution. T h is condition is not yet liberty, which consists in Kantian vein in ou r free conformity to the moral law; but it is a kind o f sheer potential for such positive freedom, the darkly indeterminate source o f all our active self-determination. In the aesthetic, we are temporarily emancipated from all determination whatsoever, either physical or moral, and p ass instead through a state o f utter determinability. It is a world o f pure hypothesis, a perpetual ‘as i f ’, in which we experience our powers and capacities a s pure form al possibilities, drained o f all particularity; and it is thus a condition o f being somewhat equivalent to K ant’s pure aesthetic capacity for cognition, which remains untrammalled by the deter­ mination o f a specific concept. All o f this, however, makes the aesthetic, that mighty force at the root o f our moral humanity, sound like nothing so much as a simple aporia. T w o strenuously antagonistic forces cancel each other out into a kind o f stalem ate or nullity, and this sheer suggestive nothingness is o u r pre-capacity for all value. T h ere is, however, nullity and nullity m ere blank negation, and that richly potential vacuity which, as the

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suspension o f every specific constraint, lays the fertile ground for free action. In the aesthetic condition, [M anl m ust, consequently, in a certain sense, return to that negative state o f complete absence o f determination in which he found h im self before anything at all had m ade an im pression upon his senses. But that form er condition was completely devoid o f content; and now it is a question o f combining such sheer absence o f determination, and an equally unlimited determinability, with the greatest possible content, since directly from this condition som ething positive is to result. T h e determination he has received through sensation m ust therefore be preserved, because there m ust be no loss o f reality; but at the sam e time it must, inasmuch as it is limitation, b e annulled, since an unlimited determinability is to come into existence. T h e problem is, therefore, at one and the sam e time to destroy and to maintain the determination o f the condition - and this is possible in one way only: by confronting it with another determination. T h e scales o f the balance stand level when they are empty; but they also stand level when they contain equal weights. (141) T h e aesthetic is a kind o f creative im passe, a nirvanic suspension o f all determinacy and desire overflowing with entirely unspecific contents. Sin ce it nullifies the limits o f sensation along with its com pulsiveness, it becom es a kind o f sublim e infinity o f possibilities. In the aesthetic state, ‘man is Nought, i f we are thinldng o f any particular result rather than o f the totality o f his powers, and considering the absence in him o f any specific determination* (146); bu t this negativity is thereby everything, a pure boundless being which elu des all sordid specificity. T aken as a whole, the aesthetic condition is suprem ely positive; yet it is also sheer emptiness, a deep and dazzling darkness in which all determinations are grey, an infinity o f nothingness. T h e wretched social condition which Schiller m ourns the fragmentation o f human faculties in the division o f labour, the specializing and reifying o f capacities, the mechanizing and dissociating o f human powers - m ust be redeem ed by a condition which is, precisely, nothing in particular. As entirely indeterminate, the

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aesthetic upbraids the drastic one-sidedness o f society with its own seren e playfulness o f being; but its release from all determination is also a dream o f absolute freedom which belongs with the bourgeois order itself. Unlim ited determinability is the alert posture o f one ready for anything, as well as a utopian critique o f all actual, determ inate being from an eternally subjunctive standpoint. Sch iller speaks o f the power which is restored to humanity in the aesthetic m ode as ‘the highest o f all bounties* (147), and in celebrated phrase rem arks that m an is fully human only when he plays. But i f this is so , then the aesthetic m ust be the tclos o f human existence, not the transition to such an end. It would certainly appear more free than the domain o f morality, precisely because it dissolves all ethical constraints alon g with physical ones. O n the one hand, the aesthetic ‘only offers us the possibility o f becom ing human beings, and for the rest leaves it to o u r own free will to decide how far we wish to make this a reality’ (14 9 ); on the other hand, as a state o f pure untrammelled possibility, a fusion o f sensual and rational, it would seem superior to what it enables, a ground elevated above what rests upon it. T h is ambiguity reflects a real ideological dilemma. T h e problem with Kantian freedom is that the moral law which enshrines it would also seem to undercut it. T h is freedom is o f a peculiarly peremptory kind, issuing its im perious decrees in apparent indifference to the needs and natures o f its subjects. T ru e freedom may thus be shifted to the aesthetic; but since this is innocent o f all moral direction and concrete determ inations, it is hard to see how it will do as an adequate im age o f social practice. T h e aesthetic is whatever is the other o f any specific social interest; it is without bias to any definite activity, but precisely on that account a general activating capacity. Culture is the negation o f all concrete claim s and commitments in the name o f totality - a totality which is therefore purely void because it is no m ore than a totalization o f negated moments. T h e aesthetic, in brief, is mere Olympian indifferentism: ‘because it takes under its protection no single one o f m an’s faculties to the exclusion o f the others, it favours each and all o f them without distinction; and it favours no single one m ore than another for the simple reason that it is the ground o f possibility o f them all* (151). Unable to say one thing without saying everything, the aesthetic says nothing whatsoever, so boundlessly eloquent as to be speechless. In cultivating every possibility to the limit, it risks leaving u s m usclebound and immobilized. If, after

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aesthetic enjoyment, ‘we find ourselves disposed to prefer som e one particular m ode o f feeling or action, but unfitted or disinclined for another, this may serve as infallible p ro o f that we have not had a purely aesthetic experience . . .* (153). A s the very taproot o f our m oral virtue, the aesthetic is apparendy invalid unless it predisposes us indifferently to martydrom or murder. It is the way we come to think and act creatively, the transcendental ground o f our practice, yet all particular thought and action are a falling o ff from it. As soon as we suffer concrete determination we have lost this pregnant nothingness, keeling over from one absence into another. Human existence would seem a perpetual oscillation between two types o f negation, as sheer aesthetic capacity lapses through action into limitation o f being, only to revert again to itself. T h e aesthetic, in short, is socially useless, just as its philistine critics maintain: ‘ for beauty produces no particular result whatsoever, neither for the understanding nor for the will. It accom plishes no particular purpose, neither intellectual nor moral; it discovers no individual truth, helps us to perform no individual duty and is, in short, as unfitted to provide a firm basis for character as to enlighten the understanding’ (147). B u t all this, precisely, is the aesthetic’s crowning glory': superbly indifferent to any one-sided truth, purpose or practice, it is nothing less than the boundless infinity o f our total humanity, ruined as soon as realized. Culture, it would seem , is just a perpetual openness to anything. B y the close o f Schiller’s text, the aesthetic is showing signs o f overreaching its humble status as handm aiden o f reason. T h e moral law it formally subserves would seem inferior to it in one major respect: it is incapable o f generating positive affective bonds between individuals. T h e law subjects the individual will to the general, thus securing the general conditions o f possibility o f social life; it sets subject over against subject, curbing their inclinations, but cannot act as a dynamic source o f social harmony and pleasurable intercourse. R eason implants in humanity the principles o f social conduct, but beauty alone confers on this conduct a social character. ‘T aste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individ’ial . . . only the aesthetic m ode o f communication unites society, because it relates to that which is comm on to all’ (215). T aste, moreover, can offer all this and happiness too, as the grim strictures o f morality cannot: ‘Beauty alone makes the whole world happy*

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(217), whereas the price o f moral virtue is self-abnegation. T h e aesthetic is the language o f human solidarity, setting its face against all socially divisive elitism and privilege: ‘N o privilege, no autocracy o f any kind, is tolerated where taste rules’ (217), and esoteric knowledge, led out by taste into the ‘broad daylight o f Com mon S e n se ’, becom es the common possession o f society as a whole. T h e aesthetic state, in short, is the utopian bourgeois public sphere o f liberty, equality and democracy, within which everyone is a free citizen, ‘having equal rights with the noblest’ (219). TTie constrained social order o f class-struggle and division o f labour has already been overcom e in principle in the consensual kingdom o f beauty, which installs itse lf like a shadowy paradise within the present. T aste , with its autonomy, universality, equality and fellow-feeling, is a whole alternative politics, suspending social hierarchy and reconstituting relations between individuals in the im age o f disinterested fraternity. C ulture is the only true social harmony, a shadowy oppositional society within the present, a noumenal kingdom o f persons and ends secretly traversing the phenomenal realm o f things and causes. Yet if the aesthetic thus suggests the form o f a wholly different social order, its actual content, as we have seen, would seem no more than an indeterm inate negation, brimming with nothing but its own in­ expressible potential. T h e positive unity o f class society, in other w ords, would seem to be nothing at all, potent but mysteriously elusive; any discourse capable o f spanning that society’s actual, m ultiple divisions m ust indeed be o f remarkably low definition. As the ideal unity o f a divided reality, the aesthetic is necessarily am biguous and obscure; to see it as a matter o f potential alone is to confess that in this society individuals are at odds with each other as soon as they have acted. Cultural unity m ust be pressed back beyond all actual self-realization, which in this order is likely to prove dominative and partial; culture exists to enable human self-determ ination, but is also violated by i t Its force can be preserved, then, only if its content is steadily dwindled to nothing. Culture in no sense determ ines what we should do; it is rather that, in continuing to d o whatever we are doing, we act with an equipoise which im plies w e could just as easily be doing som ething else. It is thus a question o f style, or ‘grace’ as S ch iller would term it: we will learn best how to behave by taking our cue from a condition which involves doing nothing whatsoever. N eith er the moral law nor the aesthetic condition, then, will wholly

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suffice as im ages o f the ideal society, which is why, perhaps, Schiller’s work seem s unwittingly tom between elevating the law above the aesthetic, and the aesthetic over the law. T h e law, o f course, officially reigns suprem e; but it can offer no sensuous representation o f the freedom it signifies, and the alarming truth must be faced that morality is incapable in itself o f providing the ideological bonding essential for social cohesion. In its Kantian form, it is too abstract, individualist and imperious, too sadistically desirous o f subm ission in its subjects, to carry' through these consensual tasks at all effectively. T h e onus o f such a project therefore shifts to the aesthetic; yet i f the ethical is too formulaic and unbending for such purposes, too little sensitive to individual differences, the aesthetic would seem in its own way equally empty o f practical content. I f the law is too astringently m asculine, too implacable in its exactions, the aesthetic is too malleably feminine. Culture marks an advance on a formalistic moral ideology by its openness to the senses; yet that embrace o f the sen suous takes the form o f defusing its determinate contents, hence falling back into the very formalism it was out to transcend. T h e aesthetic for Schiller involves the creation o f sem blance; and since sem blance involves a creative indifference to N ature, it is through a delight in such beautiful appearance that ‘savage’ human beings first grope their laborious way upward from animal dependency on their environment to the freedom o f the aesthetic. Humanity launches out on the path o f its true liberty, effecting a breach in its biological nature, once it ‘starts preferring form to substance, and jeopardising reality for the sake o f sem blance’ (205). I f this movement abandons N ature at one level, it also stays faithful to it at another - for N ature itself has prodigally lavished on its creatures more than the bare necessities o f existence, and offers in this material surplus a dim prevision o f the illimitability o f aesthetic freedom. T h e aesthetic, then, is in this sense natural: we m ust be prodded upward into it by the power o f N ature itself, since what otherwise might impel us towards it - the will - is a product o f the state o f freedom , not its precondition. B u t the aesthetic is at the sam e time unnatural, since in order to com e into its own the imagination m ust make som e mysteriously inexplicable leap out o f this purely material super­ abundance into its own fertile autonomy. T h e relation between N ature and freedom, in short, is aporetic: the latter breaks sharply

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with the former, but somehow under the former’s own impulsion. Freedom cannot take o ff from itself, since this would suggest that there was already a will to do so, thus rendering freedom anterior to itself. But i f freedom shares som e kinship with N ature, how can it be free? T h e negative indeterminacy o f the aesthetic} transitional point between N ature and freedom , necessity and reason, is thus required as a solution to the riddle o f where freedom com es from, o f how it could ever have possibly been bom o f the unfree. T h e enigma o f the aesthetic is the solution to this puzzit - which is to say that one riddle is merely answered with another. T h e obscurity o f Schiller’s doctrine o f the aesthetic is the inscrutibility o f the origins o f freedom in a society where rational subjectivity is the negation o f all sensuousness and materiality. How freedom and necessity, subject and object, spirit and sense can possibly go together is, in such an alienated social order, theoretically im possible to say. Yet there are increasingly urgent political reasons why they should d o so, and the obscurity o f the aesthetic in Schiller’s thought is the upshot o f this im passe. T h e ambiguities o f Schiller’s work, dutifully tidied away to ‘paradoxes’ by his English editors, are signs o f genuine political dilem m as. Indeed the whole text is a kind o f political allegory, in which the troubled relations between sense drive and formal drive, or N ature and reason, are never far from a reflection on the ideal relations between populace and ruling class, or civil society and absolutist state. Schiller draws the parallel quite explicitly himself, com paring the relation between reason (which enjoins unity) and N ature (which dem ands multiplicity) to the desirable relation between political state and society. T h e state, while its demand for unity is absolute, must nevertheless respect the ‘subjective and specific character* o f its m aterials (the populace); it m ust nurture and respect spontaneous impulse, and achieve its unity without suppressing plurality. J u s t as reason in the aesthetic realm cunningly inserts itself within the sensual, refining it from the inside into compliance with its own injunctions, so the political state ‘can only becom e a reality inasm uch as its parts have been tuned up to the idea o f the whole* (21). It is the aesthetic, as ideological reconstruction and hegemonic strategy, which will accomplish this end; so that ‘once m an is inwardly at one with him self, he will be able to preserve his individuality however much he may universalise his conduct, and the State will be m erely the interpreter o f his own finest instinct, a clearer formulation

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o f his own sense o f what is right* (21). I f this fails to happen, Schiller warns, i f ‘subjective man sets his face against objective man*, then the latter (the state) will be forced into the coercive suppression o f the form er (civil society), and will ‘ruthlessly trample underfoot such powerfully seditious individualism in order not to fall a victim to it* (21). In this bleak political condition, ‘ the concrete life o f the Individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea o f the Whole m ay drag out its sorry existence, and the State remains forever a stranger to its citizens since at no point d o es it ever make contact with their feeling* (37). Political power, in short, m ust implant itself in subjectivity itself, if its dom inance is to be secure; and this process requires the production o f a citizen whose ethico-political duty has been internalized as spontaneous inclination. M oral greatness, Schiller argu es in his essay ‘O n G race and Dignity*, is a question o f obeying the moral law; but m oral beauty is the graceful disposition to such conformity, the law introjected and habituated, the reconstruction o f on e’s entire subjecthood in its term s. It is this whole cultural life-style which is the true object o f m oral judgem ent, not, as with K ant, certain discrete actions: ‘M an is intended not to perform separate moral actions, but to be a m oral being. N ot virtues, but virtue is his precept, and virtue is nothing else than an inclination to duty.’4 An atomistic ethics, earnestly calculating the effects o f intentions o f each distinct action, is anti-aesthetic: the shift from morality to culture is one from the power o f the head to the rule o f the heart, from abstract decision to bodily disposition. T h e ‘whole’ human subject, as we have seen elsew here, m ust convert its necessity into freedom , transfigure its ethical duty into instinctual habit, and so operate like an aesthetic artefact. ‘ O n G race and Dignity*, like The Aesthetic Education o f M an, m akes no secret o f the political foundations o f this aesthetic. ‘L e t us suppose*, Schiller writes, ‘a monarchical state administered in such a way that, although all goes on according to the will o f one person, each citizen could persuade him self that he governs and obeys only his own inclination, we should call that government a liberal government* (2 0 0 -1 ). Sim ilarly, i f the m ind is m anifested in such a way through the sensuous nature subject to its em pire that it executes its behests with the m ost faithful exactitude, or expresses its sentim ents in the m ost perfectly speaking manner, without going in

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the least against that which the aesthetic sen se dem ands from it as a phenom enon, then we shall see produced that which we call grace’ (201). G race is to personal life, in brief, as the spontaneous subm ission o f the m asses is to the political state. In the political as in the aesthetic order, each individual unit behaves as though it governs itse lf by virtue o f the way it is governed by the law o f the whole. T h e absolutist prince o f reason must neither restrict all free movement o f the sen ses which serve him, nor allow them libertine sway. Schiller takes K an t to task for unjustly setting aside the rights o f sensuous nature, claim ing instead that morality m ust couple itself with inclination and so becom e a kind o f ‘second nature’. K an t’s moral theory, in other words, is damagingly incapable o f becom ing effective ideology. I f the moral law, that m ost sublim e witness to our human grandeur, does nothing but humiliate and accuse us, can it really be true to its Kantian status as a rational law o f self-conferred liberty? A nd is it altogether surprising that human beings will be tempted to rebel against a juridical power which appears to be alien and in­ different to them? T h e dangers o f aestheticizing the law to nothing, however, remain firmly in Schiller’s sights. I f it is true, as he argues in ‘On G race and D ignity’, that ‘the moral perfection o f man cannot shine forth except from this vety association o f his inclination with his moral conduct’ (206), it is equally the case, as he reminds u s in his essay T h e M oral Utility o f Aesthetic M anners’, that taste is in itself a dubious foundation for moral existence. O rder, harmony and perfection are not in themselves virtues, even if ‘taste gives a direction to the soul which disposes it to virtue’ (132). Another essay, ‘O n the N ecessaiy Lim itations in the U se o f Beauty o f Form ’, is likewise concerned to restore the edge to the rational: here Schiller contrasts the ‘body’ or m aterial dim ension o f a discourse, where the imagination may be perm itted a certain rhetorical license, with its conceptual substance, and warns o f the dangers o f rhetorical signifier com ing to usurp conceptual signified. Su ch a move assign s too high a status to the fem inine, for women are concerned with the ‘m atter’ or external m edium o f truth, its beauteous embellishm ents, rather than with truth itself. G ood taste involves the regulated coupling o f male and fem ale, signified and signifier, constative and perform ative; but this coupling is not symmetrical, since power and priority m ust always lie with the former terms. Rhetoric, or the sen suou s body o f a discourse,

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m ust never forget that it ‘carries out an order emanating from elsew here’, that it is not its own affairs it treats of; if this forgetfulness were to occur, men might end up becom ing indifferent to rational substance and allow themselves to be seduced by empty appearance. W om an, in brief, is a co-partner who m ust know her place: ‘taste m ust be confined to regulating the external form, while reason and experience determine the substance and the essence o f conceptions* (245). T aste has its drawbacks, in short: the more it refines and sophisticates us, the more it sap s our inclination to perform actions com m anded by duty which revolt our sensibilities. T h e fact that we should not be brutes is no excuse for becom ing eunuchs. H ow ard Caygill has convincingly argued that Kantian aesthetics stan ds at the confluence o f two opposed traditions: the British lineage o f ‘ sympathy*, moral sense and natural law, which believes it possible to foster a harmonious unity in bourgeois civil society independently o f juridical coercion and political decree; and the Germ an rationalist heritage flowing from Leibniz and Christian W olff to Alexander Baum garten, which in its concern with the universal validity and necessity o f the aesthetic is bound up with the ideologies o f legality o f an enlightened absolutism .5 Such G erm an aesthetics, in its pre­ occupation with law and concept as against sense and feeling, implies the dom inance o f state legality over the ‘moral* or affective dom ain o f civil society. Schiller’s work is a significant qualification o f this tendency: social unity m ust be generated in a sense from ‘below*, from an aesthetically transform ed or ideologically reconstituted civil society, not legislated arbitrarily from above. Yet the reservation o f ‘in a sense* is significant, since the way this will come about is not through som e sentimental populist faith in natural spontaneity, but, as we have seen, through reason, in the disguise o f the aesthetic, sm uggling itself into the enemy cam p o f sensation in an effort to know, and hence m aster, its antagonist. If, then, Schiller is on the one hand notably nervous o f law, which as he writes in his essay on the pathetic tends to restrict and humiliate us, h e also betrays from time to tim e a pathological suspicion o f the sen ses, which threaten to clog the free soaring o f rational spirit. An idealist impulse to sublimate the sen sual to the point o f evaporation is at odd s with a more judicious m aterialist recognition o f N ature’s stubborn autonomy. But if the form er project plays too readily into the hands o f rationalist absolutism , the latter viewpoint acknowledges the reality o f sensuous

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experience only at the risk o f having to renounce the absolutism o f reason and the transformative power o f the imagination. T h e aesthetic ideal, as we have seen, is an interfusion o f sense and spirit, which teaches us that ‘the moral freedom o f man is by no m eans abrogated through his inevitable dependence upon physical things’.6 Yet this felicitous partnership is by no means as mutual as it looks: ‘in the realm o f truth and morality, feeling may have no say whatsoever; but in the sphere o f being and well-being, form has every right to exist, and the play-drive every right to command’. T h e deconstruction, in other words, is all one way: the form-giving potency o f male reason penetrates and subdu es the inchoate sensual fem ale, but as ‘feeling* she has no reciprocal voice in the sphere o f truth and morality. In the highest condition o f humanity - the aesthetic state - sem blance will reign suprem e, and ‘all that is mere m atter ceases to b e’ (217). Such beautiful appearance veils the squalour o f sensual reality, and ‘by a delightful illusion o f freedom, conceals from us our degrading kinship with matter* (219). An idealized version o f the woman as beauty is w ielded against a debased im age o f her as sensuality. Schiller’s text has arrived at the very threshold o f N ietzsche’s celebration o f the aesthetic as life-enhancing illusion in The Birth o f Tragedy, and a similar pessim ism about material life underlies both affirmations. H is aesthetic programm e is on the one hand positive and constructive - an hegemonic strategy for which culture is no solitary contemplative dream ing but an active social force, offering in its utopian public sphere o f civilized intercourse the m issing mediation between the degraded state o f civil society (N ature) and the political requirem ents o f the absolutist state (reason). But this resourceful social project is in partial contradiction with its author’s aestheticist idealism: the form er involves a faith in the sensuous body and a liberal distrust o f tyrannical reason too deeply qualified by the latter. T h e brave effort to refine matter into spirit, while somehow preserving it as m atter, founders on the intransigent appetitive life o f civil society, and can turn at crisis-point into an aestheticizing away o f this whole degraded domain. In this m ood, the aesthetic would seem less to transfigure material life than to cast a decorous veil over its chronic unregeneracy. Culture is at once active social remaking and ethereal realm o f being, authentic freedom and the mere hallucination o f happiness, a universal community which can be located ‘only in some few chosen circles’

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(219). I f it is internally contradictory', it is because its relation to society as a whole can only be one o f conflict. Sch iller’s aesthetic thought provides som e o f the vital constituents o f a new theory' o f bourgeois hegemony; bu t it also protests with m agnificent passion against the spiritual devastation which that em ergent social order is wreaking, and this is the aspect o f it which h as perhaps been m ost rem em bered.7 ‘In the very bosom o f the most exquisitely developed social life*, Schiller writes in the Aesthetic Education o f M an , ‘egotism has founded its system, and without ever acquiring therefrom a heart that is truly sociable, we suffer all the contagions and afflictions o f society. We subject our free judgem ent to its despotic opinion, our feeling to its fantastic custom s, our will to its seductions; only our caprice do we uphold against its sacred rights* (27). T h e proliferation o f technical and empirical knowledges, the divisions o f social and intellectual labour, have severed the ‘inner unity o f hum an nature* and set its harm onious powers at variance with one another in a ‘disastrous conflict* (33). ‘ Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment o f the Whole, man h im self develops into nothing b u t a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the m onotonous sound o f the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony o f his being, and instead o f putting the stam p o f humanity upon his own nature, he becom es nothing more than the imprint o f his occupation or o f his specialised knowledge* (35). Such one-sided development, so Schiller trusts, is a necessary stage in the progress o f R eason towards som e future synthesis; and this is a view he shares with K arl M arx, whose critique o f industrial capitalism is deeply rooted in a Schillerian vision o f stunted capacities, dissociated powers, the ruined totality o f human nature. T h e whole radical aesthetic tradition from Coleridge to H erbert M arcuse, lamenting the inorganic, mechanistic nature o f industrial capitalism , draws sustenance from this prophetic denunciation. What m ust then be em phasized is the contradictoiy nature o f an aesthetic which on the on e hand offers a fruitful ideological m odel o f the human subject for bourgeois society, and on the other hand holds out a vision o f hum an capacities by which that society can be m easured and found gravely wanting. T h at ideal, o f a rich, all-round development o f human subjective powers, is inherited from a traditional, pre-bourgeois current o f humanism, and stands im placably askew to possessive individualism; but there are other

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aspects o f the aesthetic which can fulfil som e o f that individualism’s ideological needs. In its crippling lop-sidedness, bourgeois society is the enemy o f aesthetic thought; but that thought recasts the relations between law and desire, reason and the body, in ways which have m uch to contribute to the emergent social order. T h e test o f a truly radical aesthetics will be its ability to operate as social critique without sim ultaneously providing the grounds o f political ratification.

Notes 1 Gilles Dcleuzc, Kant's Critical Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 50. 2 See John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (London, 1969), chapter 1. 3 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L . A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), p. 77. All subsequent references to this text will be given parenthetically after quotations. 4 ‘ On Grace and Dignity’, in Works of Friedrich Schiller (New York, n.d.), vol. IV, p. 200. All subsequent references to Schiller’s essay's refer to this volume, and are given parenthetically after quotations. 5 See Howard Caygill, ‘Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories o f Art and Society 1640-1790*, unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Sussex, 1982. 6 Schiller, On theAesthetic Education ofMan, p. 187. Subsequent references to this text are given parenthetically after quotations. 7 See, for example, Georg Lukdcs, Goethe and His Age (London, 1968), chapters 6 & 7; Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), chapter 2, Part 11; Margaret C. Ives, TheAnalogue o f Harmony (Louvain, 1970). For other studies of Schiller’s aesthetics, see S. S . Kerry, Schiller's Writings on Aesthetic (Manchester, 1961), and L.P. Wessell, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism*, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 10, no. 3 (1971).

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The World as Artefact: Fichte Schelling, Hegel

,

‘T o o tender for things*, was how H egel disdainfully described Kant*s proto-m aterialist zeal to preserve the Ding-an-sich. F o r why preserve a realm about which absolutely nothing can be said? Sin ce nothing can be predicated o f it, K an t’s thing-in-itself is a cypher as resistant to symbolization as the Lacanian real, more enigmatic even than G od (o f whom we can predicate certain qualities), the mere sign o f an absence. T h e essence o f reality can be preserved only by being removed from the realm o f cognition, and so cancelled. In som e fantasy o f the death wish, the world will b e rendered safe by being erased , insulated from the vagaries o f subjectivism in the crypt o f its own non-being. T h at which cannot be nam ed cannot be violated; only nothingness, as H egel him self knew, is purity o f being, so ble ssedly free o f determination that it does not even exist. Intersecting o u r world at every point is an entire phantasm al universe, which is the way reality might appear to us if we were not the limited creatures we are. W e can say that such appearance would be different, but since we cannot say how it would be different the difference in question becom es pure, which is to say nothing whatsoever. A s pure difference, the Ding-an-sich m akes no difference at all. It is com forting, even so, to know that there is an inviolable domain o f b ein g so far removed from our life that it h as all the intelligibility o f a squ are triangle. H eg el will have none o f this effeminate cringing before the thingin-itself, this timid last-m inute withdrawal o f thought from its full penetration o f the object. F o r him, as m ore explicitly for N ietzsche after him, it is as though the sage o f K ön igsberg is a pathetic old eunuch on this score, too tender and feminine by half, loitering

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irresolutely on the very threshold o f som e full possession o f being without the potency to p ress ahead. H is is at best a mere half-virility, able to conceive thought itself as active but then sundering it from its m asterful appropriation o f the object. K an t’s Oedipal protectiveness tow ards the m aternal body places the real reverently out o f bounds, prohibiting that im pious coupling o f subject and object for which H eg el’s dialectical programm e will clam our. H is system is feebly androgynous, active in respect o f thought but passive with regard to sensation, a sham efaced idealism still sentimentally ensnared in em piricism . And the upshot o f this unmanly compromise, as H egel and others saw, is mere contradiction: like the maternal body, the th in g-in-itself is posited and prohibited at a stroke, so utterly self­ identical that language falters and swerves oflf from it, leaving behind it the sheer trace o f a silence. K ant’s epistem ology mixes concept and intuition, m asculine form and feminine content, but this marriage is unstable from the outset, neither fish nor fowl. Form is external to content in the realm o f understanding, left without content in practical reason, and elevated to an end in itself in aesthetic judgem ent. H egel, by contrast, will have the courage o f his idealist virility, penetrating to the very essence o f the object and delivering up its inm ost secret. H e will carry the contradictions o f thought right into the thing itself, into the veiled and tabooed, and so will risk Assuring the reality which for K ant must remain chastely intact, dividing it against itself by the labour o f the negative. B ut this is only possible because he already knows, in som e K leinian fantasy o f reparation, that this violated being will finally be restored to itself whole and entire. T h e narrative o f Geist may be one o f strenuous conflict, but this dialectical activism is folded within Geist9s circular, womb-like enclosure, its constant tautological return upon itself. Indeed from this standpoint the sexual roles o f K an t and H egel are reversed with a vengeance. It is K ant, in the stark solitude o f the ethical ‘O ught’, who stan ds austerely aloof from desire, censoring all copulation between freedom and N ature, surrendered to a reason continually at war with the flesh; and it is H egel’s dialectic which will restore to these bloodless form s their proper carnal content, sublating m ere morality into the sensuous body o f ‘concrete ethics’ ( Sittlichkeit), returning all formal categories to the rich, fertile movement o f Geist's self­ becom ing. H egel’s restlessly active subject, thrusting itself into N ature’s m ost

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secret recesses in order to unmask her a s an inferior version o f him self, need have no fear that his desire will rip him from Nature and leave him bereft o f a ground. F o r the subject’s break from its imaginary communion with the world, with all the self-estrangem ent and unhappy consciousness which such a rupture involves, is no more than a necessary moment o f Spirit’s imaginary return to itself. What figures for the subject as a catastrophic lapse into the symbolic order figures for the Absolute as mere spum e on the wave o f its imaginary self-recuperation. T h e subject’s fall from narcissistic self-presence to alienation is simply a strategic move within the Absolute’s own brooding narcissism , a ruse o f reason whereby it will finally rise to the delights o f contemplating itself in the mirror o f human selfconsciousness. Like the Oedipal son, the subject must surrender its unm ediated unity with the world, endure splitting and desolation; but its ultimate reward will be integration into reason itself, whose apparent harshness is thus merely kindness misperceived. Division and contradiction are the very constituents o f a deeper imaginary identity; splitting, in a consoling fantasy, is also healing, a binding tighter o f the circle o f Geist, which a s the identity o f identity and non­ identity will gather such difference into itself as enrichm ent Its ceaseless loss o f being is thus the very' dynamic by which it grows to fullness. K an t, as we have seen, distinguishes the aesthetic fiction o f a world-for-the-subject from the clear-eyed realm o f the understanding, which tells us that objects finally exist for themselves in a way quite beyond the reach o f mind. H egel will override this distinction at a stroke, refusing at once that dream o f a Fichte in which the object is nothing apart from the ego, and the bleak condition in which it turns its back on humanity altogether. Reality for H egel is inseparably for us an d for itself, for us in the very essence o f what it is. T h in gs exist in them selves, but their truth will emerge only through the steady incorporation o f their determinations in the dialectical whole o f Spirit. What m akes the object truly itself is simultaneously what turns its face towards humanity, for the principle o f its being is at one with the root o f our own subjectivity. H egel projects K an t’s aesthetic fiction into the very structure o f the real, thus rescuing the subject at once from the hubris o f subjectivism and the miseries o f estrangement T h e bourgeois dilemma, that what is objective escapes my possession, and what I p ossess ceases to be an object, is thus resolved: what is

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wholly mine is nevertheless entirely real, and mine precisely in that solid reality. T h e imaginary is elevated from the aesthetic to the theoretical, shifted up a gear from feeling to cognition. Ideology, in the shape o f the identity o f subject and object, is installed at the level o f scientific knowledge; and H egel can thus afford to assign art a lowly place in his system, since he has already covertly aestheticized the whole o f the reality which contains it. H egel’s great achievement, as Charles Taylor has argued, is to resolve the conflict between the bourgeois subject’s drive for freedom and its desire for an expressive unity with the world.1 H e offers, in short, a formidable synthesis o f Enlightenment and Romantic thought. T h e dilemma o f the bourgeois subject is that its freedom and autonomy, the very essence o f its being, put it at odds with N ature and so cut from beneath it any ground by which it might be validated. T h e m ore autonomous the subject grows, the less it can justify its existence; the more full-bloodedly it realizes its essence, the m ore alienated and contingent it becom es. T h e price o f liberty is radical hom elessness, as the Schlegelian doctrine o f romantic irony attests: the furious dynamic o f bourgeois desire exceeds any objective correlative in the world, threatening to strike all o f them provisional and banal. A desire which realizes itself thus com es to seem just as futile as one which does not. S o it is, as H egel shrewdly recognizes, that the euphoric activism o f the romantic subject is only ever a hair’s breadth away from utter nihilism, likely at any moment to keel over into jaded disillusion, entranced as it is by the im possible dream o f som e pure productivity without a product. One o f ideology’s most fundamental requirem ents - that humanity should feel reasonably at hom e in the world, find som e confirming echo o f its identity in its environs - would seem tragically at odds with the libertarian ideology o f the bourgeoisie. Fichte, detecting behind K ant’s Ding-an-sich the minatory shadow o f Spinozism , with its exaltation o f N ature and consequent denial o f freedom, will propose the absolute ego as pure subjective activity for its own sake, an ego which needs to posit N ature simply as the field and instrument o f its own expression. T he world is no more than a notional constraint against which the ego may flex its m uscles and delight in its powers, a convenient springboard by which it can recoil onto itself. N ature a s non-ego is merely a necessary moment o f the ego, a temporary given instantly transcended, posited only to be abolished. H egel sees that i f this Fichtean ego is to

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do more than endlessly chase its own tail, i f it is to be grounded and guaranteed, then it m ust be forced down from its unseemly m egalom ania to the sober terrain o f N ature and history. Fichte’s frenetic activism is one form o f aestheticism: like the work o f art, the absolute ego takes its law from itself alone, expanding its own powers simply for the sake o f it. H egel will curb Fichte’s rhapsodic selfreferentiality by recalling us to the object, but in doing so merely replaces one form o f aestheticization with another: in the mighty artwork o f Geist, subject and object, form and content, part and whole, freedom and necessity slide in and out o f each other incessantly, and ail o f this, moreover, happens just for its own sake: there is no point to these subtle strategies other than Spirit’s patient self-perfection. I f grounding the subject is not to negate its freedom, then history and N ature m ust first o f all have been transform ed into freedom themselves. I f the subject is to unite with the object without detriment to its autonomy, subjectivity must be sm uggled into the object itself. History must be imbued with all the self-determ ining autonomy o f reason, colonized as the homeland o f Geist. H egel can thus resolve the Kantian antinomy o f subject and object by boldly projecting one o f its terms into the other, converting K an t’s aesthetic fiction - the unity o f subject and object in the act o f judgem ent - into ontological myth. I f the world is subjectivized, the subject can be anchored in it with impunity; the dynamic activism o f Fichte’s entrepreneurial ego can continue unabated, but now without fear that it will simply cancel out the object. ‘M ind’, remarks one o f H egel’s disciples, ‘ is not an inert being but, on the contrary, absolute restless being, pure activity, the negating or ideality o f every fixed category o f the abstractive intellect.’2 It is just that what all this frantic negating will uncover is the rational totality o f the world; and for its full disclosure, human subjectivity is indispensable. I f we are at hom e in history, it is because histoiy has need o f our freedom for its own fulfilment. Few more elegant solutions to the conflict o f groundedness and autonomy could be imagined. It belongs to the freedom and necessity o f the Idea that it should come to consciousness o f itself, and the place where this happens is the mind o f the Hegelian philosopher. F a r from being pointlessly contingent, human subjectivity was reckoned into the equation since the world began. Infinity, which for H egel could not subsist without finitude, needs us quite as much as we need it. T h is,

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so to speak, is an imaginary on the side o f the object: there is that in the object itself which posits a rational subject, without which the object would lapse into non-being. It is mind, H egel writes in the Encyclopaedia, which cognizes the logical Idea in N ature, and thus raises N ature to its essence. As in the small infant’s dream s o f immortality, the world would not exist if it itself ceased to be; what it is for reality to be autonomous is for it to centre upon us. T h e bourgeoisie is thus no longer caught in the H obson’s choice o f clinging to its freedom but abandoning the world, or clinging to that world but sacrificing its autonomy. I f reason is what estranges us from N ature - if, for K ant, it drives a wedge between being and humanity then reason, this time as Vernunft rather than Verstand, can be turned against itself to lead us back home, the rational gains o f the Enlightenm ent preserved but their alienatory losses liquidated. T h e very power that divorces us from being, given a dialectical twist, is always in the process o f returning us safely to its bosom . T h e contradictions o f bourgeois history are projected into reality itself, so that, in a cunning coup de grâce o f the dialectic, to struggle with contradiction is by that very act to be at one with the world, which has, so to speak, just the sam e problem s as ourselves. I f the essence o f reality is contradiction, then to be self-divided is to be rooted in the real. S o m e human beings, Fichte suggests in the Science o f Knowledge, remain pathetically fixated in the mirror stage, reliant for their sense o f identity on external images, in flight from their own existential freedom : Som e, who have not yet raised themselves to full conscious­ n ess o f their freedom and absolute independence, find themselves only in the presentation o f things; they have only that dispersed self-consciousness which attaches to objects, and has to be gleaned from their multiplicity. T h e ir image is reflected back at them by things, as by a mirror; if these were taken from them, their se lf would be lost as well; for the sake o f their se lf they cannot give up the b elief in the independence o f things, for they themselves exist only if things do . . ? H egel will rescue the subject from this benighted condition, but unlike Fichte he will not thereby maroon it on the desolate peak o f its

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own autonomy. Instead, he will reconstruct this imaginary register at a higher theoretical level, giving the world back to the subject but this time as idea. T h e dialectical twists and turns by which this is accomplished are well known. T h e Absolute must be a subject, since otherwise it would suffer determination from the outside and thus cease to be absolute. T herefore everything that exists is a subject; but this cannot be so, as there can be no subject without an object. There m ust, therefore, be objects; but these objects must be peculiar kinds o f subject. If this is a contradiction, that is hardly a thought likely to disturb such a mighty dialectician. H egel writes in his Preface to the Phenomenology o f Spirit that he is not concerned with relating the work to the circumstances which surround it. T h is, the usual business o f prefaces, would be so much extraneous chit-chat, inimical to the universal, self-validating character o f a philosophical system. If such a system is to be complete, then the dominion it exerts over the world must be deployed at the same stroke over its own preconditions. A discourse o f absolute knowledge would otherwise never be able to get o ff the ground, since whatever it launches o ff from is rendered in that act anterior to itself, and so extrinsic to its hegemony. Sim ply by starting, such a work risks jeopardizing its own transcendental status, undercutting its own claim s in the very act o f enunciating them. T h e system, it seem s, must somehow always already have begun, or at least hang in some perpetual present, utterly coeval with its object. It must in som e sense take o ff from a point identical with itself, opening itself to the world without for a moment relinquishing this intimate self-involvement; yet if a discourse is to begin from nothing whatsoever, spring selfcom plete from its own depths, how would it ever come to enunciate anything but its own act o f saying? How could its content ever be anything but its form? T o say that an absolute system must take o ff from itself is equivalent to claiming that the first postulate which founds it, and sustains it throughout, is nothing less than the pure act o f theorizing itself. T h e postulate o f the work must be implicit in its own act o f enunciation, as indissociable from it as aesthetic content from aesthetic form. What is this first postulate that we can never go back beyond? F o r J. G . Fichte in The Science o f Knowledge, it can only be the subject. F o r though I can imagine som ething behind the subject

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which posits it, the fact remains that it is I, the subject, who am doing the imagining. T h e subject can never get a grip on itself from the outside, since it would already need to be a subject to do so, and this outside would thus have become an inside. Like som e dizzying vista dwindling to infinity, the subject stretches back endlessly before all conceivable beginning, intolerant o f all origin. ‘Self-consciousness*, as Schelling writes in his System o f Transcendental Idealism, ‘is the source o f light for the entire system o f knowledge, but it shines only forward, not backward.’4 In the act o f self-positing, for Fichte and Schelling, I know m yself as infinite and absolute; and since transcendental philosophy is no more than a complex elaboration o f that act, its founding absolute principle is the veiy gesture o f selfconsciousness itself. T h e whole theoretical enterprise becomes no m ore than a reprise o f that primordial, incontrovertible act by which the subject posits itself, a metaphor o f that infinite moment in which the subject ceaselessly em erges and re-em erges into being. What philosophy says is thus identical with what it does, its form and content quite indistinguishable, its constative character at one with its performative practice. Theory is a living im age o f what it speaks of, participates in what it reveals, and is thus a kind o f Romantic symbol in discursive prose. I f the founding postulate o f a system is to be absolute, then it must escap c all objectification and so cannot be in any way determinate. F o r such a principle to be determinate would imply som e ground beyond itself from which it could be determ ined, thus ruining its absolute status at a stroke. T h e subject is exactly this point o f pure self-determ ination, this ‘thing’ sprung eternally from its own loins which is no thing at all but sheer unconceptualizable process, infinitely in excess o f any degraded given. But if this is the case, how d o es this irrefutable first principle not simply slip through the net o f knowledge, leaving theory resting on nothing at all? How can philosophy find sure anchorage in this elusive spectre o f a subject, this slippery parody o f a phenomenon which is gone as soon as we give name to it, this untheorizable source o f all our actions which seem s fully present in none o f them? How is the transcendental philosopher not to end up clutching empty air each time he tries to round upon that which is the very unthinkable condition o f his efforts, and which in knowing - in rendering determinate - he would strike dead? Is such transcendental thought anything more than an

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im possible hauling o f on eself up by one’s own bootstraps, a farcically self-undoing attempt to objectify a subjectivity which, simply to be what it is, must give the slip to all objectivity? All knowledge is founded upon a coincidence o f subject and object; but such a claim cannot help sliding a disabling duality between the two in the very act o f announcing their felicitous marriage. Knowledge o f the se lf as an object cannot be knowledge o f it as a thing, for this would be to strike determinate and conditional the very unconditional first principle o f all philosophy. T o know the se lf is instantly to undercut its transcendental authority; not to know it, however, is to be left with the vacuous transcendence o f a cypher. Philosophy requires an absolute ground; yet i f such a ground must be indeterminate it cannot be determ ined as a ground. We are confronted, it would seem , with a H obson ’s choice between meaning and being, either destroying our first principle in the act o f possessing it* or preserving it only in abysm al ignorance. T h e only way out o f this dilemma would be a form o f objectifying knowledge coterminous with, even constitutive of, the s e lf - a cognitive power by which we could generate objectivity from the very depths o f the subject without for a moment endangering its self-identity, a knowledge which would m im e the very structure o f the subject itself, rehearsing the eternal dram a by which it brings itself into being. T h is uniquely privileged form o f cognition is the subject’s intuitive presence to itself. F o r Fichte, the subject is no more than this inexhaustible process o f self-positing; it exists exactly in so far as it appears for itself, its being and self-knowing wholly identical. T h e subject becom es a subject only by positing itse lf as an object; but this act remains entirely within the enclosure o f its subjectivity, and only appears to escape it into otherness. T h e object as such, comments Schelling, vanishes into the act o f knowing; so that in this primordial subject-object we glimpse a kind o f reality which, far from preceding the subject (and so dislodging it from its transcendental status), is its very constitutive structure. T h e se lf is that special ‘thing’ which is in no way independent o f the act o f knowing it; it constitutes what it cognizes, like a poem or novel, and like the work o f art too its determinate content is inseparable from the creative act o f positing it. Ju s t as the determinate objectivity o f the artefact is no more than the self-generative process by which subjectivity em erges into being, so the se lf is that sublimely structuring source which will come to know

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each o f its determinate aspects as mere transient moments o f its infinite self-positing. Sin ce this infinite self-production is the very essence o f the subject’s freedom , philosophy, which repeats the act by which the self com es to know itself, is an emancipatory praxis. ‘Freedom *, writes Schelling, ‘is the one principle on which everything is supported’; and objective being is no barrier to this, since ‘that which in all other system s threatens the downfall o f freedom is here derived from freedom itself’.s Being, viewed in this light, is merely ‘freedom suspended*. Philosophy is thus in no sense contingent to its object, bu t an essential part o f its self-articulation. F o r it is philosophy which will show how the objective being which the free subject experiences as constraint is in fact a necessary condition o f its infinity, a sort o f boundedness or finitude posited by the subject only to be dynamically surpassed. In the act o f self-consciousness, the subject is infinite as knower but knows itself as finite; but such finitude is essential to its infinity, since, as Fichte argues, a subject which had overcome objectivity as a whole by fully realizing its freedom would merely cancel itself out, having nothing any longer to be conscious of. In the act o f theory, then, the subject attains to its deepest selfknowledge, becom ing more essentially and authentically what it already is; and transcendental discourse is thus an ethical, even existential praxis rather than a fusty set o f theorems» a liberator)action in which the se lf com es to experience at the level o f full selfawareness what was implicit in its inmost structure all along. Philosophy merely writes large the founding gesture o f the subject’s free self-production, achieving its absoluteness by miming an utterly unconditioned reality o f which it is the expressive symbol. Ju st as this transcendental subjectivity is quite unknowable from the outside - is, indeed, pure process or activity, a sort o f sheer contentless quicksilver energy - so philosophy itself can only be known in the doing, can validate itself only in the formal process o f its self-production. We know the truths o f philosophy, as we know the transcendental nature o f subjectivity, because we are it and do it; so that theory is just a kind o f catching ourselves in the act o f being subjects, a deeper appropriation o f what we already are. T he subject’s act o f transcendental freedom grounds the system, but not as som e essence separable from it, since this would instantly discredit the system ’s aspirations to absolute self-identity. It is rather that this grounding is the system’s

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own free self-production, the very form o f its curving back upon itself, the gesture by which it spins itself at every point out o f its own guts. T h e first postulate o f the philosophy cannot be contended over, as this would be the ruin o f its primacy; it cannot be thrust down to the lowly status o f the conditioned and controversial, but must have all the intuitive self-evidence o f the fact that I am at this very moment experiencing. As this principle is gradually unfolded in the discursive intricacies o f theoretical argument, we shall become aware that it has never for a moment ceased to cling to the interiority o f itself, that everything which can be derived from it was implicit in it from the outset, and that we are pacing the circum ference o f an enorm ous circle which is exacdy the circle o f our own free self-positing. W e are thinking about ourselves thinking, rehearsing in the very formal structure o f our acts o f reading the mighty them es which lie before us on the page. It is the drama o f ourselves that we find mirrored there, but now raised to the dignified level o f pure self-consciousness, transparently at one both with the act o f philosophical enunciation itself, and with the praxis by which the whole world comes to be. T he postulate o f transcendental freedom is one which, as both Fichte and Schelling remark, we m ust share already for any o f this discourse to m ake the slightest sense: we have already been in on this argument, and if we have succeeded in understanding it by the time the Conclusion arrives it is because we have always been understanding it already. Ju st as we know our freedom only by enacting it, for anything we could objectify in a concept would by that token not be freedom, so we grasp this argument in the act o f perform ing it, and could say no m ore than we could o f a poem or painting how its referential force is separable from the shape o f its enunciation. Philosophy is not som e report on human freedom but the very practice o f it, showing what it states; since freedom is not som e possible object o f cognition, it can be manifested only in the act o f mind which refers to it. T h e content o f the theory, as with the artefact, is indeed in that sense its form: it d oes what it describes, inscribes the unsayable in its very structure, and by bringing the reading subject to a certain self-illumination validates itself in the very process o f its own construction. Philosophy fashions its own object as it goes along, rather than remaining slavishly reliant on some set o f prem ises removed from the mastery o f its writing: ‘the whole science’, as Schelling comments, ‘is concerned only with its own free construction’.6 T heory is a self-consum ing

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artefact, striking itself redundant in the very act o f bringing the subject to absolute self-knowledge. T h is is to say that the self-referentiality o f K ant’s ethical subject or work o f art has now been projected into the very structure o f cognitive argum ent, which is always curled up on its own tail. It is as though the Kantian text is still struggling to handle in realist or representational style that utterly unrepresentable ‘thing* which will finally be encircled only by a break to full-blooded philosophical ‘modernism* to the kind o f theoretical work which, like the symbolist poem, generates itself up entirely out o f its own substance, projects its own referent out o f its formal devices, escapes in its absolute selfgroundedness the slightest taint o f external determination, and takes itse lf as its own origin, cause and end. T h e self-validating practical subject o f K an t’s philosophy is cranked up through several gears to the act o f cognition itself. K an t’s own carefully discriminated discourses - o f pure and practical reason, and o f aesthetic judgement - are conflated together at a stroke: theoretical reason, Schelling rem arks, is simply imagination in the service o f freedom. Fichte, for his part, will take the Kantian moral subject and project it into a kind o f dynamic revolutionary activism. And this whole operation, so K a n t’s successors would claim, is enabled by a fatal aporia in the K antian system itself. F o r that system can be read as both implying and failing to thematize a knowledge o f the ego which would be neither logical nor empirical - just as it refuses to concede that a knowledge o f how subject and object interact to produce cognition m ust itself somehow be absolute. K ant, from this viewpoint, has failed to push the issue back far enough; and his inheritors, seizing with alacrity on this apparent lapse o f theoretical nerve, will accordingly fall one by one over the edge into the abyss o f transcendental intuition. K an t has delivered us a Nature from which it is impossible to derive value, which must consequently becom e an end in itself; but som e o f his successors will, so to speak, put that whole process into reverse, m odelling N ature itself after the freely self-generative subject, and thus grounding that subject in a world whose structure it shares. As a little work o f art all in itself, its form and content m iraculously unified, the subject is m icrocosm ic o f that more im posing aesthetic totality which is the universe. F o r Fichte, the ego is a tendency to activity for its own sake; but when it reflects upon itself, it recognizes that this self-activity is

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subject to a law - the law o f determining itself in accordance with the notion o f self-determination. Within the ego, then, law and freedom are inseparable: to think o f on eself as free is to be compelled to think o f on e’s freedom as falling under a law, and to think that law is to be com pelled to think on eself free. As in the artefact, freedom and necessity coalesce into a unitary structure. What has happened here is that the imagination, which plays a certain role in K ant’s pure reason, has been grossly expanded in function. For Kant himself, the imagination provides an answer to the problem o f how the data o f sen se intuition become subsum ed under the pure concepts o f the understanding, for these two realms appear quite heterogeneous to one another. It is here that the imagination intervenes as a mediatory power, producing the ‘schem ata’ which in turn produce the im ages which regulate the process o f applying the categories to appearances. Fichte assigns to the imagination a considerably more central role, finding in it the very source o f our belief in a world independent o f the ego. Fichte’s megalomaniac philosophy o f the ego has an evident problem in explaining why, empirically speaking, we actually believe in îhe existence in a reality independent o f our consciousness; and this com es about, so Fichte argues, because there is within the absolute ego a kind o f spontaneous, unconscious force which produces the very idea o f that which is non-ego. T h e absolute ego somehow spontaneously limits its own restless activity and posits itself as passively affected by an object outside itself; and the power by which il does this is the imagination. Fichte can then go ahead and deduce the Kantian categories from this founding imaginative act: if apparently autonomous objects are posited, then a space and time m ust also be posited for them to inhabit, as well as our m eans o f conceptually determining what they are. Pure reason or empirical knowledge, in short, can now be derived from the transcendental imagination; and the sam e is true o f practical reason or morality. F o r the ‘objective ’ world or Nature which the imagination posits is also necessary for that incessant striving o f the ego which for Fichte is the basis o f all ethical action; one could not speak o f the ego as ‘striving’ unless it encountered som e kind o f check, and the external world is posited to provide it. T h e ego feels its im pulses inhibited by something apparentl} bcvond itself, and it is this feeling which is therefore at the root ol our belief in a real world. Reality is established no longer through theoretical knowledge, but through a kind o f sentiment; and

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Fichte has to this extent aestheticized the very possibility o f knowledge. O ur knowledge o f the world is ju st a kind o f spin -off o f a m ore fundamental unconscious force; behind the presentations o f the understanding lies a spontaneous ‘drive to presentation*. M oral life, in a sim ilar way, is a kind o f higher development o f these unconscious instincts, in an interesting anticipation o f Sigm und Freud. It thus becom es possible to deduce everything there is - the external world, morality, the categories o f the understanding - from the spontaneous, unconscious drives o f the absolute ego, at the basis o f which we discover the imagination. T h e whole world h as its root in an aesthetic source. Friedrich Schelling, who starts out as a disciple o f Fichte, becom es increasingly discontented with his m entor’s drastically one-sided philosopy o f subjectivity. F o r to be a subject must surely entail being conditioned by an object, and in this sense the conscious subject itself cannot be an absolute. Fichte, in other w ords, is unable to break out o f the vicious circle o f all theories o f the subject’s identity with itself as a reflected object: if the subject is able to recognize its objectification as its own, then it must somehow already know itself, and what was to be established is thus presupposed. It is not clear in any case how such theories are to avoid an infinite regress, as Fichte h im self w as to come to acknowledge: to distinguish the ‘I’ that thinks from the i * thought about would seem to posit a further T which is able to do this, and so on indefinitely.7 Schelling consequently retreats to the notion o f an absolute reason or identity which transcends the duality o f subject and object altogether as an ‘indifference’ to both, and which can itself never be objectified. T h is absolute then appears as a kind o f unconscious force at work in the conscious subject; but in the objective idealism o f Schelling’s Naturphilosophie it becom es equally the essence o f all objective being; and what m ost suprem ely incarnates this absolute identity, prior to all su b ject-o b ject division, is art itself. F o r the Schelling o f the System o f Transcendental Idealism , the only place in the world where we can find a true objectification o f that ‘intellectual intuition’ by which the s e lf produces itself is the aesthetic. ‘T h e objective world’, Schelling writes, ‘is simply the original, as yet unconscious poetry o f the spirit; the universal organon o f philosophy - and the keystone o f its entire arch - is thephilosophy o f art.’* T h e ordinary subject in the world would seem cripplingly split

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between conscious and unconscious: only that part o f me which is limited is present to my consciousness, whereas the limiting activity o f the subject itself, precisely because it is the cause o f all such constraint, is bound to fall out o f representation as an unspeakably transcendent power. I am aware only o f my own boundedness, not o f the act through which that is posited; it is only in limiting itself that the ego can come to be, but since it can thus only know itself as limited, it cannot in this way come to be for itself. Like bourgeois society as a whole, the self is tom between its restless, unrepresentable productivity and those determinate products (acts o f self-positing) in which it finds and loses itself simultaneously. T here is an aporia at the very heart o f the subject which thwarts its complete self-identity: at once sheer empty energy and determinate product, the self can know that it is bounded but is puzzled to know how, since to know how would entail grasping itself from some subjectless exterior. Without limitation there could be no becoming, and hence no freedom , but the mechanisms o f this process remain stubbornly unintuitable. Philosophy must therefore culminate in som e concrete reconciliation o f this dilemma, and the name o f this unity is art. In art, the unconscious acts through and identically with consciousness; and the aesthetic intuition is thus a unique material representation o f intellectual intuition in general, a process by which the subjective cognition o f philosophy becom es itself objectified. ‘Art’, writes Schelling, ‘is at once the only true and eternal organon o f philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us o f what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious.*9 At the very peak o f its powers, philosophy m ust logically liquidate itself into aesthetics, reversing its forward momentum and flowing back into the poetry from which it was long ago bo m . T h e philosophical is no more than a self-effacing track from one poetic condition to another, a temporary spasm or contortion in the efflorescence o f spirit. Indeed Schelling’s System , as it nears its own closure, enacts this very rhythm o f return: We therefore close with the following observation. A system is completed when it is led back to its starting point. But this is precisely the case with ou r own. T h e ultimate

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ground o f all harmony betw een subject and object could be exhibited in its original identity only through intellectual intuition; and it is precisely this ground which, by means o f the work o f a n , has been brought forth entirely from the subjective, and rendered wholly objective, in such wise, that we have gradually led our object, the se lf itself, up to the very point where we ourselves were standing when we began to philosophise.10 H aving arrived at the notion o f the work o f art, itself the most exemplary objectification o f subjectivity, Schelling’s text must logically close its own circle and curve back upon itself, becoming its own self­ sealing artefact in the very act o f speaking o f art. By culminating in the work o f art, philosophy doubles back on its own abstract subjectivism, returning to that subject spontaneously objectified in the world which was the starting-point o f such reflections. At the frontier where it sublates itself into art, philosophy flips itself over and rejoins that intellectual intuition from which it originally took off. Art is superior to philosophy because whereas the latter grasps objectivity from within its own subjective principle, the former renders this whole process objective, raises it to the second power, perform s it in reality as philosophy enacts it within the arcane recesses o f spirit. Philosophy may unite subject and object within its own depths, but these depths must then themselves be concretely externalized. And this ‘must* is, among other things, an ideological imperative. F o r the plain fact o f the matter is that the ordinary subject-in-the-street is not quite up to the mysteries o f Schellingian philosophizing, and stands in need o f som e more sensuously representational embodiment o f it if its reconciling power is to be effective. A s a materially objective m edium , art is a more universally available instance o f intellectual intuition than philosophy itself, which for Schelling can never as such becom e widely current Intellectual intuition is confined to philosophy alone, and m akes no appearance in ordinary consciousness, whereas art concretely figures it forth, at least in principle, for everyone. T ak e sen suous objectivity from art and it falls to the rank o f philosophy; add such objectivity to philosophy and it rises to overcome itself in the aesthetic. Art, comments Schelling in Schillerian phrase, belongs to the Svhole m an’, whereas philosophy brings only a fraction o f him with it to its lofty summit. T o go beyond philosophy is thus in a sense

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to return to the quotidian, with art as the indispensable relay or mediation between the two. T h e aesthetic, that is to say, brings theory home to everyday social experience as incarnate ideology, the place where all this fine-drawn obscurantist brooding fleshes itself out in spontaneous understanding. But if this is true, it suspends a huge question mark over the whole status o f theory itself. Reason, like Schelling’s own text, ends up by im m olating itself, self-destructs and disappears into its own sealed circle, kicks away the conceptual ladder which, as in W ittgenstein’s Tractatus, it has so laboriously climbed. T h is is not to say that Schelling’s own philosophy is unnecessary, since only by the detour o f theory will we be led to accede to theory’s necessary dem ise, watching it rum its own weapons against itself. N or is it to say that cognitive reason is finally ousted by aesthetic intuition, since it was that, in effect, all along. Indeed the irony o f the entire project is that reason, to be sufficiently self-grounding, m ust be m odelled from the outset on the aesthetic, a ‘guarantee* o f absoluteness which succeeds only in striking it empty. But it is to say that once we have read Schelling we really have no more need for philosophy - that his system, like H egel’s a little later, in this sense exerts its inexorable dominion over the future as well as the past.

H egel, as is well known, parts company with Schelling’s full-blooded aestheticization o f reason, contemptuously dism issing his portentous ‘intuition* as the night in which all cows are black. T o lapse into such rhapsodic ramblings (‘fictitious creations that are neither fish nor flesh, neither poetry nor philosophy’, H egel grumbles) is to insult the dignity o f bourgeois reason, a defeatist surrender to the fear that the world may not after all be rationally intelligible. I f that is so, then the bourgeoisie might as well abandon its intellectual enterprise before it has properly begun; and Romanticism seem s to H egel a dreadful instance o f such theoretical suicide. H is own philosophy, by contrast, represents a last-ditch, eleventh-hour, full-dress attempt to redeem society for rationality - to do all that his intuitionist colleagues do and m ore, yet to do it firmly from within the standpoint o f reason. Kant has apparently cut the real world o ff from knowledge; Fichte and Schelling have restored it, but only in the vagaries o f intuition; H egel will strive to redeem the world and knowledge simultaneously. I f the

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bourgeoisie is to establish itself as a truly universal class, at the level o f culture as much as o f political and economic practice, then the vacuously self-validating absolutism o f a Fichte or Schelling is not only not ideologically sufficient; it also h as an ominous ring, in a rather different register, o f that dogmatic absolutism which the whole project o f bourgeois enlightenment arose to vanquish. Philosophy is in need o f som e surer foundation; and the problem with intuition is that it is surer than anything in one sense and pathetically feeble in another. Nothing could be more ineluctable, self-evident, close to the eyeball; and nothing either could be m ore quirky, gratuitous and undem onstrable. Its very' force seem s inseparable from its utter em ptiness; it merely isy which is at once its seductive power and its em barrassing uselessness. It cannot be gainsaid, but only because there is nothing articulate enough to be contradicted. In a complex, contradictory society, where contentions over value have become notably intense, the bourgeoisie yearns for the solace o f the apodictic; but this will only be found at a point o f formalist abstraction so tenuous that it vanishes instantly into its own purity. Achieving your goal and falling short o f it thus occur in the sam e instant. N obody is going to bother dissenting over a blank space; we are all united at that sublim e point where absolutely nothing is at stake, where what we experience, as in the Kantian aesthetic, is ju st the very abstract forms o f our consensus, uncontaminated by any potentially divisive content. F o r a theoretical system to ground itself in such a space may render it conveniently invulnerable to counter-argument, but only because it is left hanging precariously in a void. T o say that one’s system is rooted in transcendental intuition com es embarrassingly close to saying that it is rooted in nothing at all - that the formal emptiness o f the selfjustifying Kantian moral subject has been generalized throughout the system ’s very' letter, to the point where absolute self-groundedness is indistinguishable from pointless tautology. Such theories pivot on a central blankness and so curve constantly back on themselves, inviting us to admire them as we would admire some intricately selfsupporting formation o f acrobats whose dubious triumph is precisely that they might at any moment come clattering to the ground. It is hard for any theory invoking the claim o f absolute intuition to avoid a certain appearance o f self-contradiction. F o r the final truth which it will deliver us seem s unavoidably at odds with the textual labour devoted to disclosing it, to the point where we cannot help

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suspecting that i f this labour was indeed necessary, then the absolute cannot be as ineluctable as all that. In the doubled, revealing/ concealing rhythm o f the symbol, the writing which uncovers ultimate truth cannot help but occlude it too, pedantically tracing in postlapsarian time what secretly belongs to eternal immediacy. In this sen se, the absolute would seem distanced from us by the very discourse sent out in its pursuit. T h e fact that we have need o f such a discourse in the first place already suggests that something has gone awry, that philosophy com es about because o f a Fall which it repeats in the very act o f trying to repair. I f all were as well as the theory suggests, then why are we reading at all, rather than just revelling in the rich plenitude o f our intuitions? I f philosophy exists, then we can already deduce at least one other existent, namely contradiction or false consciousness as its essential precondition. But if that is so then no philosophy can be absolute, since the very appearance o f it indicates that in relation to which it is inevitably belated. What need would there be for science at all, if reality were not already fissured and fragmented in ordinary consciousness? H egel's philosophy is am ong many other things a superbly cunning riposte to this dilemma. T h at there is conflict is made clear by philosophy’s very existence; indeed H egel him self remarks that division is the source o f the need for philosophy. But philosophy will reveal that such diremptions are inherent in the very truth it has to deliver, thus projecting its own historical conditions into its spiritual substance. What brought us to this philosophy in the first place - the fact that we were sunk in som e miasma o f false consciousness, stum bling around for a likely exit - w as always already secretly foreseen by it, as the very tangled pathway by which it would bring us patiently to itself. As in Freudian theory, these errors and blindnesses belong to the very trajectory o f truth, and are to be worked through, in that therapeutic process known as reading the works o f G . W. F. H egel, rather than austerely repressed: In the course o f its process the Idea creates that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it; and its action consists in getting rid o f the illusion which it has created. Only out o f this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. Error or otherbeing, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic

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element o f truth; for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.11 T ru th is not just the constative propositions o f theoretical enquiry but the rhetorical perform ance o f the theoiy itself, entirely at one with its subtlest contortions and occasional cul-de-sacs, a practice rather than an abstractable statement. T h e Absolute Idea has already charitably included the reader’s reifying illusions and shaky grasp o f logic within itself, and thus always takes ofT from a point preceding both the reader and the entire history which went into his or her making. If philosophy is famously belated, the owl o f Minerva which takes flight only at dusk, it is simply because the historical drama it recapitulates requires its own full-dress entry as an actor onto the scene only at a relatively late point, for reasons the Absolute, as director o f the entire theatre, has foreseen from the beginning. I f division and contradiction are essential moments o f the Idea’s stately unfurling through time, then it is because H egel has subsum ed the historical conflicts which necessitate his theory, and so threaten to relativize it, into the theory itself, converting its preconditions into its very dialectical form. T h e Phenomenology o f M ind is thus doom ed to repeat the very negations its strives to overcom e; and every reader o f the text will have to enact this process afresh, in that ceaseless repetition which is now all that is left o f philosophy. B u t this perform ance is itself an essential part o f Geist*s global self-expansion, a post-history o f the text determined by its very letter, a necessary constituent o f Spirit’s arrival at full self-consciousness in the mirror o f the reading subject’s mind. In this sen se, the constative dimension o f the work is not at all at odds, however much it might at first appear so, with the performative labour o f tracking these issues through discursive time. T h ere is no need for any foolish Romantic fear that to articulate the Absolute is in that m om ent to disarticulate it, since the Absolute, as the identity o f identity and difference, knows that only by such internal rending or reading will it ever be whole. I f it is true that theory is only necessary because o f false consciousness, it is equally true that false consciousness is itself necessary, so that philosophy is instantly redeem ed from any merely contingent status. H egel’s work takes o ff from loss and lack, but will demonstrate by its ways o f filling them in just how intrinsic to positivity such negation is. T h e whole philosophy is historically essential, itself part o f the

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upward evolution o f Spirit, a free but determined moment o f praxis within the global praxis it both describes and mimics; but to secure itse lf thus in an historical ground is not to lay itself open to external determination, since this history is itself the product o f the very Spirit which im pels its own discourse, and so is included within itself. T h e H egelian text is thus constative in its very perform ativeness: it is exactly in its self-referential construction o f its own principles that it m anifests how the world is, for the world is just like this too. Philosophy springs from the sam e root a s reality itself, and so in curving back meditatively upon its own construction delivers us the inner structure o f everything that exists. S u c h self-reflectiveness is therefore just the opposite o f that o f the m odernist text, since although its inner strategies are deeply ironic, it expels all irony from its own relation to the real. T h e self-generative nature o f m odernist writing implies a kind o f faute de mieux: if the text authorizes its own discourse, then this, so it wryly insinuates, is because no reliable historical authorization can any longer be assum ed. T h e world is no longer stoiy-shaped, and thus can provide no external determination o f a textual form which is consequently thrown back on its own devices, abandoned to the tragicomic tautology o f making itself up as it goes along. Self-grounding here is ju st another name for unm asking the arbitrariness o f all foundations, demystifying the presumption o f some natural starting-point somehow cued by the very structure o f the given. T h e self-authorizing discourse o f idealism, by contrast, hopes to mime the structure o f the given in this very gesture: the more broodingly autotelic such language becom es, the more resolutely realist it grows. T h ere can be no ironic play between discourse and history, precisely because the form er has always already swallowed up the latter. T o say that such idealist philosophy has no determinable foundations is paradoxically to grant it the deepest possible guarantee, since its foundation is then identical with the undeterm inable first principle o f reality itself. In starting from itself, the m odernist work is ironically non-identical with itself, since it proclaim s its own incapacity to validate the truths it h as to communicate. It might always at any moment be som ething else, and casts the blighting shadow o f this possibility across its actual enunciation. F o r Hegelian dialectics, anything at any moment actually is som ething else, but this is precisely the sign o f its location within a rational totality. T o think at all for H egel is profoundly ironic, since it

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involves suppressing the particularity o f the given with the universality o f the concept, and vice versa; but these local ironies cannot add up à la m odernism to one enorm ous one, since in relation to what would the whole be ironic? Transcendental philosophy does not validate itse lf faute de mieur. if there is no authority to which it need appeal, it is because it has always already introjected it. T h e doubleness o f Schellingian intuition is that it is at once experientially certain and rationally discreditable; the ambiguity o f H egelian reason is that it is internally coherent but notably hard to feel. Both m odels, then, have their strengths and drawbacks as ideological paradigm s. T h e problem for H egel is that, given the grievous complexity and contradiction o f social conditions, knowledge o f the whole can no longer be spontaneous; and any project o f rational totalization will thus be forced into a convoluted discursivity which threatens to limit its ideological effectiveness. In making the world transparent to theory, H egel runs the risk o f making theory opaque to the world. W e have left behind ancient G reece, a society which H egel likens to an artefact, where a spontaneous knowledge o f the whole w as still routinely available. An immense dialectical labour is now on the agenda; and H egel in a sense does his job too well - too well at least for Schelling’s subject-in-the-street, who is a little more likely to be imaginatively stirred by art than to take to the streets crying ‘T h e rational is the real!’ or ‘L o n g live the identity o f identity and nonidentity!* T h is is not to claim that H egelianism is incapable o f becom ing a political force, as M arx and the Young H egelians well enough demonstrate; but it is to suggest a certain difficulty over the question within the system o f sensuous ideological representation. ‘Philosophy*, so H egel argues against Schelling, ‘is o f its very nature, by virtue o f its general mode o f existence, available for alP ;'2 indeed m uch o f H egel’s contempt for intuitionism springs not only from a fear that such dogm atic solipsism subverts all social bonds, but from his b elief that only a determinate system o f thought can be properly intelligible. Only what is perfectly determinate in form, he argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable o f being learned and p o ssessed by everybody. H egel’s baroque lucubrations, ironically enough, are intended to be in the service o f a general accessibility. Intuition, with its ‘horrified rejection o f mediation*, is desperately esoteric and so ideologically crippled from the outset; the intelligibly determ inate, by contrast, is common

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to scientific and unscientific mind alike, thus, as Hegel comments, enabling the unscientific mind to enter the dom ain o f science. H egel gravely underestimates the ideological force o f sensuous representation, as the low status he assigns to art within his system itself testifies. ‘T h e interruption by conceptual thought o f the habit o f always thinking in figurative ideas’, he writes testily in the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘is as annoying and troubling to this [rational] way o f thinking as to that process o f formal intelligence which in its reasoning rambles about with no real thought to reason with.’ 13 In this austere Protestant iconoclasm, H egel reveals him self as the true heir o f Immanuel Kant, who in a celebrated passage from the Critique o f Judgement likewise spurns the indignity o f sensuous representation from the depths o f a generous faith in common rationality: Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jew ish Law than the commandment: T h ou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness o f any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. T h is commandment can alone explain the enthusiasm which the Jew ish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion when com paring themselves with others, or the pride inspired by M oham m edanism . T h e very same holds good o f our representation o f the moral law and o f our native capacity for morality. T h e fear that, if we divest this representation o f everything that can commend it to the senses, it will thereupon be attended only with a cold and lifeless approbation and not with any moving force or emotion, is wholly unwarranted. T h e very reverse is the truth. F o r when nothing any longer m eets the eye o f sense, and the unmistakable and ineffaceable idea o f morality is left in possession o f the field, there would be need rather o f tempering the ardour o f an unbounded imagination to prevent it rising to enthusiasm, than o f seeking to lend these ideas the aid o f im ages and childish devices for fear o f their being wanting in potency.14 Idealist philosophy, like the commodity on which so many o f its categories are m odelled, m ust suffer n o degenerate lapse into

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sen suou sn ess, remaining sternly alo o f from the body. But if this is part o f its awesom e authority* - that it generates itself entirely out o f abstract reason - it is also what would seem to limit its ideological efficacy. T h e bourgeoisie would appear caught here between a rational self-apologia too subtly discursive to find appropriate sen suou s representation, and an ideologically seductive form o f im m ediacy (aesthetic intuition) which spurns all rigorous social totalization and so leaves itself notably vulnerable. It is a dilemma rem arked by Schiller, who comm ents in one o f his essays that ‘sen suou s presentation is, viewed in one aspect, rich, for in cases where only one condition is desired, a com plete picture, an entirety o f conditions, an individual is offered. B u t viewed in another aspect it is limited and poor, because it only confines to a single individual and a single case what ought to be understood as a whole sphere. It therefore curtails the understanding in the sam e proportion that it grants preponderance to the imagination . . .MS K ant has left ultimate reality unknowable, ethics a resoundingly hollow Ought, and organic purposiveness a m ere hypothesis o f taste; Fichte and Schelling, as though aghast at the ideological disarray into which they are thereby plunged, convert Kant’s ethics into a concrete principle o f revolutionary freedom and his aesthetics into a form o f knowledge. But this simply m eans that they have spread intuition through the whole o f the world,

collapsing the cognitive into pure feeling. H egel, then, m ust repair this dire situation, avoiding at once the bleakness o f Kantian understanding and the suffocating intim acies o f Rom antic intuition, reuniting mind and world in a style o f knowledge with all the analytic rigour o f the former, but with som ething o f the imaginative energy o f the latter. T h is form o f knowledge is the higher reason, Vernunft or dialectics. Within that dialectical system, to be sure, H egel will dexterously com bine concrete and abstract, sensuous and spiritual, negating the form er term s only to reinstate them at a higher level. B u t this does not tackle the question o f the concrete representability o f the system itself; and i f the aesthetic is exemplary o f such representation, then H egel refuses that particular solution by consigning art to a lowly run g on the ontological ladder, below religion and philosophy. Aesthetic representations for Hegel lack philosophy’s pure transparency, as their primary (material or allegorical) m eanings tend to obscure their ultimate significance as expressions o f Spirit. Indeed art for

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H egel is not properly representational at all, but rather an intuitive presentation which expresses a vision rather than imitates an object. It incarnates a sensuous awareness o f the Absolute, abolishing all contingency and so showing forth Geist in all its organic necessity. As with K an t’s aesthetic, this sensuousness is securely non-libidinal, freed from all desire, a beauty whose otherwise disruptive material force is defused by the spirit which inform s its every part. T h is intimate yet idealized body, material yet miraculously undivided, wordlessly immediate yet shaped and stylized, is what Romanticism term s the symbol, and psychoanalysis the body o f the mother. It is therefore not surprising that H egel finds som ething obscure and enigmatic about this form o f materiality, something within it troublingly resistant to the translucent power o f reason. It betrays its unsettling force m ost obviously in the ‘bad infinity’ o f oriental or Egyptian art, that grotesque spawning o f matter, vague, groping and boundless, which threatens in its fantastic heterogeneity to swamp the pure spirit like som e nightmarish creature o f science fiction. H egel finds such sublim e proliferation o f matter distinctly unnerving: within his system , this shapeless feminine stu ff is redeem able only when im pregnated by rational form, negated in its material presence and gathered into the inner unity o f the Idea. T h e oriental stage o f art is, so to speak, the child smothered by a fleshly mother; in the harm onious artefacts o f ancient G reece, child and mother have achieved som e symmetrical unity; and at the highest, Romantic stage o f art, when the alm ost disem bodied spirit yearns for freedom from its m aterial encasement, the child is in the process o f definitively overcom ing the Oedipal crisis and taking leave o f the mother altogether. We do not, then, remain with the aesthetic for long, but climb up a stage to religion, which still presents the Absolute in terms o f im ages; and finally, if we can stay the course, we rise to the rarefied conceptual representations o f philosophy itself. S in ce the H egelian system never leaves anything entirely behind, however, the charm s o f art and religion do not simply flee at philosophy’s cold touch. T hey, and religion especially, remain behind to provide what we might call the ideology o f this theory, its necessary i f inferior incarnation in everyday life. T o accuse H egel o f a rationalism wholly inimical to ideological effectiveness would be to overlook the key role played in his system by religion. Religion is the universal still enmired in the sensual, but somewhat more successful

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than art in its obscure straining to capture the Absolute. It fulfils for H egel two vital ideological functions which philosophy itself cannot properly perform : it offers us that relation to the Absolute which is a m atter o f feeling, heart and sensibility rather than arid conceptuality; and as a cultic affair it belongs not simply to subjectivity but to the ‘objective spirit’ o f institutionalized social practices. As ideology, religion crucially m ediates between the affective and the practical, providing the space in which each nurtures the other; and though the political state m ust finally stand not on religious belief but on the firmly independent foundation o f reason, it nevertheless needs religion as a cultic, affective, representational domain, a realm o f ethical conviction in which rational imperatives may strike an instinctual chord. T h is task cannot be left to ethical culture itself, otherwise humanity’s relation to the Absolute would remain narrowly parochical, caught up with the mores o f a specific society. Religion for H egel is the medium in which universal truths o f reason are affectively represented, and so plays for him something o f the role o f K a n t’s aesthetic judgement. Humanity, desirous as it is to see a sign, will be catered for in the ideological region by religious faith, o f which philosophy is the open secret. I f H egel dem otes the concept o f the aesthetic to a humble position in the evolution o f Geist, it is partly because, like G ram sci after him, he shifts the whole concept o f ‘culture’ from its aesthetic to its everyday or anthropological sense. H e thus steals an important advance on K ant, whose idea o f cultural consensus remains largely rooted in the narrowness o f aesthetic judgem ent, and so to some extent institutionally disem bodied. It was H egel, then, long before Antonio G ram sci, who helped to effect the decisive shift in political theory from problem s o f ideology to questions o f hegemony. T h e latter concept is both broader than, and inclusive of, the former: it denotes, roughly speaking, all the ways in which political power secures itself through routine institutional practices, rather than, more specifically, in those signs, im ages and representations which we term ideology. So cial cohesion, so H egel recognizes, cannot feasibly be secured in som e abstract, disinterested aesthetic intersubjectivity; it m ust anchor itse lf instead in cultural practice, in that whole densely tessellated fabric o f social life which spreads outwards from the cloistral intimacy o f the family to encom pass the various phenomena o f social class, corporations, associations and the rest. U n less the state, suprem e

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symbol o f social unity and locus o f the divine will in history, is the complex sublation o f these more regional, immediate, workaday institutions, it cannot hope to sustain its august universal power. Social unity can be established neither at the level o f the political state alone, nor in som e universalized aesthetic inwardness divorced from politics; but neither, for K ant at least, can it find a secure base in bourgeois economic practice, ‘civil society* in that narrow sense, even if K an t’s hope is that such practice might ultimately lead to human harmony. Indeed the apparent impossibility o f this latter option is one o f the great implicit questions to which idealist thought in general is an attempted answer. Like K ant, the question to which Hegel addresses him self in this respect is simply: How is social cohesion to be implemented in a form o f social life which everywhere denies it in its most routine economic activities? I f the ideological unity o f bourgeois society cannot be derived from its common social practice, if the two realms are mutually inimical, then the temptation will be to project such harmony into so rarefied a region (culture, the aesthetic, absolute intuition, the state) that its power to engage common experience will be instantly short-circuited. H egel’s ‘concrete ethical life’, viewed as the equivalent o f G ram scian ‘civil society’, offers an impressive solution to this quandary, as an intricate mechanism o f mediation between the private dom estic affections at one end and the global truths o f Geist at the other. Unlike K ant, H egel does not commit the naive error o f trying to found* spiritual community in anything as slippery as disinterestedness. Private property and abstract right are clearly too sunk in selfinterested particularism to provide a basis in themselves for ideological consensus; but it is shrew dest to begin with these unpromisingly parochial form s, and see how, via the mediations o f the division o f labour, social class and the corporations, they dialectically transcend themselves into m ore altruistic m odes o f association. T h e culmination o f all this will be H egel’s finest aesthetic artefact, the organic ‘concrete universal’ o f the state. And since the Hegelian state is strongly interventionist, it reaches back into society to reinforce its social bonds. Totality, in short, must emerge organically from the actual divisions o f concrete social life, rather than be m apped artificially on to them; and H egel will thus unify concrete and abstract by a process o f objective social mediation, rather than merely linking the two in the act o f aesthetic judgement.

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In the process o f society, each sm aller unit dialectically generates the n eed for a larger one, dissolving its particularity into greater universality, in a series o f progressively higher integrations; and since these institutions incarnate the individual subject’s free essence, it is in this essentially practical realm, rather than in the contemplative act o f aesthetic judgem ent, that subject and object becom e truly at one. H e g el’s ‘culture’ is less a special dim ension than the concrete totality o f social life as viewed in the light o f reason. It is into this concrete totality that he reinserts K ant’s abstract morality, from which, as he se e s, it is a one-sided derivation; and his social unity is thus at once m ore materially grounded than K an t’s intersubjective consensus, and at the sam e time - since it can be present a s a whole only to totalizing reason - in a certain sense more abstract. Confronted with an aggressively individualist social order, K an t partially separates culture from the terrain o f political institutions, establishing consensus through feeling rather than through the concept; H egel’s dialectic o f culture and politics represents a mutuality o f feeling and concept, whereby the abstract representations o f universal reason will gradually em erge from the Lebenswelt in which they are always dimly stirring. T h e concrete ethical world is one o f traditional, largely unreflective pieties and practices; and as such it m anifests a kind o f ‘spontaneous law fulness’ or ‘lawfulness without law’ which m akes it akin to the K an tian aesthetic. T o move from here to the political state, however, involves sacrificing the immediacy o f the Kantian aesthetic to the discursivity o f the concept, fusing individual and society not in some intuitive intersubjectivity but laboriously, indirectly, through the com plex m ediations o f family, class, corporations and the like. Kantian ‘culture’ appears from H egel’s viewpoint as excessively idealized; only by evolving social unity from the m ost apparendy unpropitious beginnings, from the competitive struggles o f civil society itself, can any political rule hope to achieve a sound enough m aterial grounding. And only by dissolving abstract morality into the rich, largely unconscious textures o f custom ary practice can K ant’s duality o f practical reason and sensibility be transcended, and political hegemony, in a directly Gramscian sense o f the term, be consolidated. T o aestheticize social life in one direction - to view it as a wealth o f concrete capacities awaiting their full creative development - means to adopt a properly dialectical form o f reason, and so to break with aestheticization in the sense o f mere intuitive immediacy.

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H egel is surely wise to believe that political unity must find its foundation in civil society; it is just that in bourgeois society any such strategy is notably difficult to achieve. Bourgeois civil society does indeed bring individuals together, but only, as Hegel h im self acknowledges, in a largely negative, objective, unconscious inter­ dependence. T h e division o f labour, for example, generates mutual dependency by its separating and specializing o f skills; but it is no sim ple matter to transform this purely objective mutual reliance into com m unity-for-itself, and H egel anticipates much o f the early M arx in his awareness o f an emergent, potentially disaffected proletariat (‘a rabble o f paupers’, as he calls them) scandalized by the extreme poles o f social wealth and poverty. It is precisely because the project o f evolving political harmony from a fissured civil society is at once essential and implausible that H egel has need o f philosophy, which will show individuals how such unity is attainable at the selfconscious level o f the political state. Unity will finally come about if individuals read their H egel and work to implement it. Philosophy, in short, does not merely describe the ideal state, but is a necessary instrument for bringing it about. One o f H egel’s notable achievements is thus to resolve in his own fashion the dichotomy between fact and value deeply entrenched in empiricist and Kantian thought. One way he does so is by holding, as M arxism was later to hold, that certain forms o f theoretical description are inescapably normative because they provide kinds o f knowledge essential to social emancipation. And this knowledge is nothing less than the whole o f the H egelian system. T h e constative dimension o f that discourse is thus inseparable from a performative aspect: only by becoming conscious o f Spirit (or more exactly by allowing it to rise to a consciousness o f itself in us) will that Spirit be politically nurtured, em bodied and extended. I f philosophy is to be anchored in the A bsolute then it m ust be essentially practical, since the essence o f the A bsolute is precisely to realize itself ceaselessly in the world. I f H egelian theory were not itself an active political force, it would lose its absolute grounding. H egel can thus shift from fact to value, cognitive to political, epistemology to ethics, with no sense o f sharp disjunction, as David Hum e and his progeny cannot. Geist is the essence o f everything that exists, and so an account o f its adventures through time would appear to be purely descriptive; but it is the essence o f all that exists in the sense o f its significant inner structure or

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trajectory, such that an account o f it provides us with norms relevant to ethical and political behaviour. N o historical epoch or social order can exist outside Geist, which would thus appear to be no more than a m ere description o f the whole; but any particular epoch or order may fail to realize Geist's imperatives adequately - even if, in thus falling short, it will be unwittingly contributing to its final triumph; and in this sense Geist stands in critical judgem ent over against the historical given. I f H egel’s philosophy is to be both theory and practice, part o f Sp irit’s very dynamic rather than a mere contemplative description o f it, then people m ust necessarily read that philosophy and come to act upon it, fashioning those political structures appropriate for the Absolute’s self-realization in history. S u c h activity cannot be left to the spontaneous movement o f history itself; there is % lack in such movement, which only the self-consciousness o f philosophy can supply. T h e value o f philosophy depends upon the limits o f the spontaneous process it charts. T h e culmination o f history is the ideal political state; but not even individuals living in that state will attain to a spontaneous knowledge o f the com plex social whole, since the differentiations o f m odem society render any such knowledge im possible. Citizens o f the ideal state will relate to the social whole only mediately, through their particular corporations and estates. H egel does not believe in the possibility o f a state in which, as in ancient society, every citizen would be immediately identified with the principle o f common life. D ifferent classes within the ideal state will live their relations to the whole in different ways, and no individual will be able to unite all o f these m odes within his or her own person. I f this is so, then H egel’s state becomes a kind o f fiction, since no one individual can possibly know it. It exists only at the level o f writing, which is why H egel’s own philosophy is necessary. T h e only place where a knowledge o f the totality resides is in the philosophy o f H egel. Absolute knowledge, as Alexandre Kojève points out, exists for H egel only as a book: ‘T h e citizen is thus only fully self-conscious to the extent to which he has read (or written) the Phenomenology o f M in d Jlb And this is because Hegelian w isdom consists not simply in living a relation to the totality, but in knowing this totality too. T h e state thus exists as a whole only for the speculative theorist: it is H egel who keeps the ideal state in existence, sustaining it by his knowledge rather a s G o d sustains the world. T h e totalization o f the state lies

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outside itself, in the mind which knows it. T h e political materializes the philosophical, but cannot be quite on equal terms with it; a gap is opened up between theory' and political practice, such that when the state is ‘lived* it is not as the complex totality present to theory, and when it is known it is not as ‘lived*. Theory’ and ideology', meaning and being, are in this ultimately at odds. It is finally in this sense that the H egelian system, as Kierkegaard continually complained, cannot be lived. It exists as a whole only for the concept, o f which there is no sensuous analogue. Reality is an organic artefact, but it cannot be spontaneously known as a whole through aesthetic intuition. W isdom for H egel is finally conceptual, never representational: the whole can be grasped through the labour o f dialectical reason, but not figured there. Art and religious faith are the closest approximations we have to such concrete imaging; but both involve sensuous representations which dilute the clarity o f the concept. Dialectical reason can render u s reality as an indivisible unity; but in the very act o f doing so it is condemned from the viewpoint o f aestheuc immediacy' to the division, linearity and periphrasis o f all rational discourse, disarticulating the very substance it seeks to totalize. Only the structure o f philosophical discourse can suggest som ething o f the synchronic truth o f the Idea it strives to explicate - an Idea which, as Heg^l remarks, ‘is the process o f its own becom ing, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose* and h as its end for its beginning*.17 T h e principle which philosophy expresses is an ‘aesthetic’ one; but this is no justification for philosophy to collapse into som e portentous intuitionism. T h e o iy in H egel follows after practice, as the tardy flight o f M inerva’s owl; and to this extent it cannot m eddle with that practice in ways harmful to its spontaneous wisdom. Spirit ripens within habitual, unconscious social activity, or ‘culture’; when it forgets this location within concrete life and acts abstractly, prematurely, the result is revolutionary fanaticism, Jacobinistic blueprinting. T h e belatedness o f theory preserves practice from such injurious abstraction, leaving it as the fertile soil from which self-consciousness will gradually flower. When theory finally begins to emerge from that ground, when the Idea begins gradually to come into its own, its primary posture is retrospective: casting an equable gaze back over the whole historical process which produced it, it sees that all o f this w as well. What prospective, performative functions theory serves

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work within the context o f this serene retrospect: the tasks o f Reason are to ensure that what has been slowly perfected is carried forward, becom ing even more essentially what it already is. Yet it is, o f course, no sim ple feat to claim that everything has been for the best. On the contrary, to argue any such grossly im plausible claim will require a staggering degree o f dialectical ingenuity, which then begins to foreground the operations o f pure mind to a point which threatens to cut that mind o ff from the concrete, spontaneous history out o f which it grows. T heory thus parts company with history in the very act o f justifying it; and this is another sense in which the project o f rescuing the world for reason involves in H egel a degree o f rarefied speculation which is notably difficult to ‘naturalize’ as an ideological mode. Confronted with the problem o f establishing social harmony in an unstable, conflict-ridden social order, the apologists o f emergent bourgeois society find themselves caught in a cleft stick between reason and intuition, dialectics and aesthetics. It would be convenient if the unity o f society could be felt as immediately as the form o f an artefact - if the law o f the social totality, as supposedly in ancient G reece, were somehow inscribed in the very appearances o f society itself, spontaneously available to each social participant. Such aestheticized social knowledge, given the divisions and complexities o f m odern life, is no longer to be hoped for: the aesthetic as a form o f social cognition yields nothing but rhapsodic vacuity. Society is indeed a kind o f artefact, a magnificent interpenetration o f subject and object, form and content, freedom and necessity; but this will becom e apparent only to the patient probings o f dialectical reason, given the strata o f false consciousness which intervene between empirical consciousness and the whole. Family, state and civil society are clasped together in intimate unity, thus allowing H egel to found ideological consensus in the very material institutions o f the existing social order. But to demonstrate the concealed linkages between family, civil society and state can be done only at the level o f the concept, rather than experientially; and there is thus a difficulty concerning the relation o f Hegelian thought to that system o f sen suous representation which is ideology. What is actually lived out in society, even in the ideal political state, can never be the totality as such , which eludes all sensuous incarnation and lives only in writing. C onfronted with these difficulties, it will not be long before some

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bourgeois theory abandons rational apologia altogether, and turns increasingly to rely upon the aesthetic.

Notes 1 See Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modem Society (Cambridge, 1979), chapter 1. 2 Quoted by Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel (New Haven and London, 1974), p. 51. 3 J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1982), p. 15. 4 F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1978), p. 34. 5 Ibid., p. 35. 6 Ibid., p. 29. 7 See, for a useful discussion o f these points, Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London, 1987), chapter 1, and Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain o f the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), Part 1 chapter 2. 8 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 12. 9 Ibid., p. 220. 10 Ibid., p. 232. 11 G .W. F. Hegel, The Logic (Oxford, 1892), para 212. 12 Quoted by Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), p. 431. 13 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), p. 43. 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgement (Oxford, 1952), pp. 127-8. 15 F. Schiller, ‘On the Necessary Limitations in the Use o f Beauty of Form’, in Collected Works (New York, n.d.), vol. IV, pp. 234-5. 16 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947), p. 305. 17 Hegel, Phenomenology ofSpirit, p. 10.

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The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer T h o u g h Schopenhauer is undoubtedly one o f the gloom iest philos­ oph ers who ever wrote, there is an unwitting comedy about his work which has to do with the presence o f the body within it. Sch openh auer studied physiology at university, and is impressively learned about the lungs and pancreas; indeed it is a striking thought that his choice o f university subjects m ight have reshaped the whole course o f W estern philosophy right up to the fashionable neoN ietzscheanism s o f our own time. F o r it is from Schopenhauer’s coarsely m aterialist meditations on the pharynx and the larynx, on cram ps, convulsions, epilepsy, tetanus and hydrophobia, that N ietzsche will derive much o f his own ruthless physiological reductionism ; and all that solem n, archaic nineteenth-century discourse on M an in terms o f the ganglia and lum bar regions, which survives at least as long as Law rence, thus form s a shady hinterland to that resurgence o f theoretical interest in the body which has also, in o u r own epoch, rather more positive and political dimensions. Schopenahuer is quite unem barrassed to detect his celebrated W ill, that blindly persistent desire at the root o f all phenomena, in yawning, sneezing and vomiting, in jerkings and twitchings o f various kinds, and seem s wholly oblivious o f the bathos with which his language can veer without warning in the course o f a page or so from high-flown reflections on free will to the structure o f the spinal cord or the excrescences o f the caterpillar. T h e re is a kind o f Bakhtinian bathos or Brechtian plumpes Denken about this sudden swooping from Geist to genitalia, from the oracular to the orificial, which in Bakhtin’s h ands at least is a political weapon against ruling-class idealism ’s

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paranoid fear o f the flesh. With Schopenhauer it is less a question o f political revolt than o f a kind o f cracker-barrel crassness, as when he solemnly illustrates the conflict between body and intellect by pointing out that people find it hard to walk and talk at the sam e time: ‘F o r as soon as their brain has to link a few ideas together, it no longer h as as much force left over as is required to keep the legs in motion through the motor nerves.” Elsewhere he speculates that the boundless, infinite objective world ‘is really only a certain movement or affection o f the pulpy m ass in the skull* (2, 273), or suggests that a short stature and neck are especially favourable to genius, ‘because on the shorter path the blood reaches the brain with more energy’ (2, 393). All o f this vulgar literalism is a kind o f theoretical posture in itself, a sardonic smack at high-toned H egelianism from one who, though a full-blooded metaphysician him self, regards H egel as a suprem e charlatan and m ost philosophy except Plato, K ant and him self as a lot o f hot air. Crotchety, arrogant and cantankerous, a scathing Juvenilian satirist who professes to believe that the Germ ans need their long words because it gives their slow minds more time to think, Schopenhauer’s work reveals a cam ivalesque coupling o f the im posing and the commonplace evident in his very name. Indeed incongruity becom es in Schopenhauer’s hands the basis for a full-blown theory o f comedy. T h e ludicrous, so he argues, springs from the paradoxical subsumption o f an object under a concept in other ways heterogeneous to it, so that an Adorno-like insistence on the non-identity o f object and concept can come to explain why anim als cannot laugh. Humour, in this speciously generalizing view, is by and large high words and low meanings, and so like Schopenhauer’s own philosophy has an ironic or dialogical structure. T h is is itself profoundly ironic, since the discrepancy between percept and concept which occasions the release o f laughter is exactly that disjuncture between experience and intellect, or will and representation, which lies at the very core o f Schopenhauer’s disgusted view o f humanity. T h e inner structure o f this bleakest o f visions is thus the structure o f a joke. R eason, that crude, blundering servant o f the imperious will, is always pathetic false consciousness, a m ere reflex o f desire which believes itself absurdly to present the world ju st as it is. Concepts, in a familiar brand o f nineteenth-century irrationalism, cannot cling to the rich intricacies o f experience, but appear maladroit and crudely reductive. B u t if this fissures the very being o f humanity into illusion,

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so that merely to think is to be self-deceived, it also provides the elem ents o f a Freudian theory o f humour: [Perception] is the medium o f the present, o f enjoyment and cheerfulness; moreover it is not associated with any exertion. With thinking the opposite holds good; it is the second power o f knowledge, whose exercise always requires som e, often considerable, exertion; and it is the concepts o f thinking that are so often opposed to the satisfaction o f our immediate desires, since, as the medium o f the past, o f the future, and o f what is serious, they act as the vehicle o f our fears, our regrets, and all our cares. It must therefore be delightful for us to see this strict, untiring, and m ost troublesome governess, our faculty o f reason, for once convicted o f inadequacy. T herefore on this account the mien or appearance o f laughter is very' closely related to that o f joy. (2, 98) Com edy is the will’s mocking revenge on the representation, the malicious strike o f the Schopenhaurian id against the Hegelian superego; and this source o f hilarity is also, curiously, the root o f our utter hoplessness.2 I f humour and hopelessness lie so close together, it is because human existence for Schopenhauer is less grand tragedy than squalid farce. Writhing in the toils o f the voracious will, driven on by an im placable appetite they relentlessly idealize, men and women are less tragic protagonists than pitiably obtuse. T h e m ost fitting emblem o f the human enterprise is the shovel-pawed mole: ‘to dig strenuously with its enorm ous shovel-paws is the business o f its whole life; perm anent night surrounds i t . . . what docs it attain by this course o f life that is full o f trouble and devoid o f pleasure? Nourishm ent and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course* (2, 3 5 3 -4 ). N othing could be more obvious to Schopenhauer than the fact that it would be infinitely preferable if the world did not exist at all, that the whole project is a ghastly mistake which should long ago have been called off, and that only som e crazed idealism could possibly believe the pleasures o f existence to outweigh its pains. Only the m ost blatant self-delusion - ideas, values, the rest o f that pointless paraphernalia -

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could blind individuals to this laughably self-evident truth. Sunk in its gross stupidity, humanity insists upon regarding as valuable a history which is so plainly the record o f carnage, misery and wretchedness that our capacity to think it in the least tolerable must itself be explicable only as a ruse o f the will, the low cunning with which it shields itself from our knowledge o f its own futility. It is hard for Schopenhauer to restrain a burst o f hysterical laughter at the sight o f this pompously self-im portant race, gripped by a rem orseless will-tolive which is secretly quite indifferent to any o f them, piously convinced o f their own suprem e value, scram bling over each other in pursuit o f som e earnest goal which will turn instantly to ashes in their m ouths. T h e world is one enorm ous market place, ‘this world o f constandy needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible afflictions, until they fall at last into the arm s o f death’ (2, 349). T here is no grand telos to this ‘battle-ground o f tormented and agonized beings’ (2, 581), only ‘momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, m uch and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on in saecula saeculorum or until once again the crust o f the planet breaks* (2, 354). I f human beings were capable o f contemplating objectively for one moment this perverse attachment o f theirs to unhappiness, they would necessarily abhor it. T h e whole race is like a diseased beggar who appeals to us for help to prolong his miserable existence, even though from an objective viewpoint his death would be altogether desirable. Only som e sentimental humanism could see such a judgem ent as callous rather than coolly reasonable. T h e most fortunate life is that with endurable want and comparative painlessness, though the result o f this is boredom . Boredom for Schopenhauer is the ch ief motive for sociality, since it is to avoid it that we seek out each other’s loveless company. All o f this sets the scene for high tragedy, yet even that we bungle: ‘our life m ust contain all the woes o f tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity o f tragic characters, but, in the broad detail o f life, are inevitably the foolish characters o f a comedy* (1, 322). History is low burlesque rather than Attic solemnity: ‘no-one has the remotest idea why the whole tragi-comedy exists, for it has no spectators, and the actors themselves undergo endless worry with little and merely negative enjoyment’ (2 ,3 5 7 ). Life

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is a grotesquely bad absurdist drama full o f farcical repetition, a set o f trivial variations on a shoddy script. T h e re is som ething amusing about the very relendess consistency' o f this Schopenhauerian gloom, a perpetual grousing with all the m onotonous, mechanical repetition o f the condition it denounces. If comedy for Schopenhauer involves subsuming objects to inappropriate concepts, then this is ironically true o f his own pessim ism , which stam ps everything with its own inexorable colour and so has the funniness o f all monomania. Any such obsessive conversion o f difference to identity is bound to be comic, however tragic the actual outlook. T o see no différence between roasting a leg o f lamb and roasting a baby, to view both as mere indifferent expressions o f the metaphysical will, is as risible as mistaking one’s left foot for the notion o f natural justice. Part o f our laughter at such rem orseless tunnel vision is no doubt relief at the wanton parade o f a monstrous egoism we ourselves have had to camouflage - though in the case o f a pervasively pessim istic vision like Schopenhauer’s such laughter may contain a nervously defensive quality too. H is perverse ignoring o f what we feel to be the more positive aspects o f life is outrageous enough to be am using, as we would smile at som eone whose only interest in great painters was in how many o f them had halitosis. Schopenhauer’s intense pessim ism , however, is in one sense not in the least outrageous - is, indeed, no more than the sober realism he h im self considers it to be. O ne-sided though this viewpoint may be, it is a fact that throughout class history the fate o f the great majority o f m en and women has been one o f suffering and fruitless toil. Schopenhauer may not have all o f the truth; but he has a larger share o f it than the romantic humanists he is out to discredit. Any more hopeful view o f humanity which has not reckoned his particular narrative into account is bound to be enfeebled. T h e dominant tale o f history to date has indeed been one o f carnage, misery and oppression. M oral virtue has never flourished as the decisive force in any political culture. W here such values have taken precarious root, they have been largely confined to the private realm. T he monotonous driving forces o f history have been enmity, appetite and dominion; and the scandal o f that sordid heritage is that it is indeed possible to ask o f the lives o f innumerable individuals whether they would not have been better o ff dead. Any degree o f freedom , dignity and com fort h as been confined to a tiny minority, while indigence,

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unhappiness and hard labour have been the lot o f the vast majority. ‘T o enter at the age o f five a cotton-spinning or other factory*, Schopenhauer remarks, ‘and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve, and finally fourteen hours, and perform the sam e m echanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure o f drawing breath* (2, 578). T h e dramatic mutations o f human history, its epochal ruptures and upheavals, have been in one sense mere variations on a consistent theme o f exploitation and oppression. N or could any future transformation, however radical, affect this record in any substantial way. F o r ail Walter Benjam in’s efforts to raise the dead themselves with the clarion call o f his eloquence, for all his urgent attempts to m uster around the frail band o f the living the fertilizing shades o f the unjustly quelled, it remains the harsh truth that the dead can be raised only in revolutionary' imagination.3 T here is no literal way in which we can com pensate them for the sufferings they received at the hands o f the ruling order. We cannot recall the crushed medieval peasantry or the wage-slaves o f early industrial capitalism , the children who died afraid and unloved in the wretched hovels o f class society, the women who broke their backs for regimes which used them with arrogance and contempt, the colonized nations which collapsed under an oppressor who found them at once sinister and charming. T h ere is no literal way in which the shades o f these

dead can be sum moned to claim justice from those who abused them. T h e pastness o f the past is the simple truth that, rewrite and recuperate them as we may, the wretched o f history have passed away, and will not share in any more com passionate social order we may be able to create. F o r all its homespun eccentricity and obdurate m onom ania, Schopenhauer’s appalling vision is accurate in many o f its essentials. H e is mistaken to think that the destructive will is all there is; but there is a sense in which he is correct to see it as the essence o f all history to date. T h is is not a truth particularly palatable to political radicals, even if it is in one sense the very motivation o f their practice. T h at this intolerable narrative cannot continue is the belief which inspires their struggle, even as the crippling burden o f that history would seem to bear mute witness against the feasibility o f such a faith. T h e source o f energy o f a radical politics is thus always the potential source o f its enervation. Schopenhauer is perhaps the first major m odem thinker to place at the centre o f his work the abstract category o f desire itself, irrespective

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o f this or that particular hankering. It is this powerful abstraction which psychoanalysis will later inherit, though it is probable that F re u d , who was said to consider Schopenhauer one o f the half-dozen greatest individuals who had ever lived, cam e to know his work only after his own theories were already formed. Ju st as capitalist society is in this period evolving to the point where it will be possible for M arx to extract from it the key concept o f abstract labour, a conceptual operation only possible on the basis o f certain material conditions, so the determinant role and regular repetition o f appetite in bourgeois society now perm its a dramatic theoretical shift: the construction o f desire as a thing in itself, a m om entous metaphysical event or self­ identical force, as against som e earlier social order in which desire is still too narrowly particularistic, too intimately bound up with local or traditional obligation, to be reified in quite this way. With Schopenhauer, desire has become the protagonist o f the human theatre, and human subjects themselves its mere obedient bearers or underlings. T h is is not only because o f the emergence o f a social o rder in which, in the form o f comm onplace possessive individualism, appetite is now becoming the order o f the day, the ruling ideology and dom inant social practice; it is more specifically because o f the perceived infinity o f desire in a social order where the only end o f accum ulation is to accumulate afresh. In a traumatic collapse o f teleology, desire com es to seem independent o f any particular ends, or at least as grotesquely disproportionate to them; and once it thus ce ase s to be (in the phenomenological sense) intentional, it begins m onstrously to obtrude itself as a Ding-an-sich , an opaque, unfathom­ able, self-propelling power utterly without purpose or reason, like som e grisly caricature o f the deity. T h e Schopenhauerian will, as a form o f purposiveness without purpose, is in this sense a savage travesty o f the Kantian aesthetic, a shoddy, inferior artefact we could all well do without. O nce desire is for the first time hom ogenized as a singular entity, it can becom e the object o f moral judgem ent as such - a move which w ould have seem ed quite unintelligible to those moralists for whom there is no such phenomenon as ‘desire’, simply this or that particular appentency on which a particular judgem ent may be passed. I f desire becom es hypostasized in this way, then it is possible, in a long Rom antic-libertarian lineage from William Blake to Gilles D eleuze, to view it as supremely positive; but the preconditions o f such

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Romantic affirmation are also the preconditions o f the Schopenhauerian denunciation o f desire tout court, accepting the categories o f Romantic humanism but impudendy inverting the valuations. Like Schopenhauer, you can retain the whole totalizing apparatus o f bourgeois humanism at its most affirmative - the singular central principle informing the whole o f reality, the integrated cosmic whole, the stable relations o f phenom ena and essence - while mischievously emptying these forms o f their idealized content. You can drain o ff the ideological substance o f the system - freedom, justice, reason, progress - and fill that system , still intact, with the actual degraded materials o f everyday bourgeois existence. T h is, precisely, is what Schopenhauer’s notion o f the will achieves, which structurally speaking serves just the function o f the Hegelian Idea or Rom antic life-force, but is now nothing more than the uncouth rapacity o f the average bourgeois, elevated to cosm ic status and transform ed to the prime metaphysical mover o f the entire universe. It is as though one retained the whole paraphernalia o f the Platonic Ideas but called them Profit, Philistinism, Self-Interest and so on. T h e result o f this move is ambivalent. On the one hand, it naturalizes and universalizes bourgeois behaviour: everything from the forces o f gravity to the blind stirrings o f the polyp or rumblings o f the gut is invested with futile craving, the whole world recast in the im age o f the market place. On the other hand, this grandly generalizing gesture serves to discredit bourgeois M an all the more thoroughly, write him repellently large, project his sordid appetites as the very stu ff o f the cosm os. T o reduce M an to the polyp is at once to exculpate him as a helpless puppet o f the will, and to insult him. T h is debunking shakes bourgeois ideology to the root, at the sam e time as its naturalizing effect removes the hope o f any historical alternative. Schopenhauer’s system thus stands at the cu sp o f bourgeois historical fortunes, still confident enough in its forms to unify, essentialize, universalize, but precisely through these gestures inflating to intolerable proportions the meagre contents o f social life. T h o se contents are thus discredited by the very move which grants them metaphysical status. T h e forms o f the H egelian system are turned against that philosophy with a vengeance; totalization is still possible, but now o f a purely negative kind. T h is is also true in another sense. F o r H egel, the free subject articulates a universal dim ension o f consciousness (Geist) which is

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nevertheless at the very core o f its identity, that which makes it uniquely what it is. And this transcendental principle, in order to be itself, stands in need o f such individuation. Schopenhauer preserves this conceptual structure but lends it a malevolent twist. What makes m e what I am, the will o f which 1 am simply a materialization, is utterly indifferent to my individual identity, which it uses merely for its own pointless self-reproduction. At the very root o f the human subject lies that which is implacably alien to it, so that in a devastating irony this will which is the very pith o f my being, which I can feel from the inside o f my body with incomparably greater immediacy than I can know anything else, is absolutely unlike me at all, without consciousness or motive, as blankly unfeeling and anonymous as the force which stirs the waves. N o more powerful image o f alienation could be imagined than this malicious parody o f idealist humanism, in which the Kantian Ding-an-sich is brought nearer to knowledge as the dircctly intuitable interior o f the subject, but nevertheless retains all the impenetrability to reason o f that Kantian realm. T h is im penetra­ bility is no longer a simple epistemological fact but an inert, intolerable weight o f m eaninglessness that we bear inside ourselves as the very principle o f our being, as though perm anendy pregnant with m onsters. Alienation lies now not in som e oppressive mechanism out there in the world, which confiscates our products and identities, but in the m ildest motions o f our limbs and language, in the faintest flicker o f curiosity or com passion, in all that makes us living, breathing, desiring creatures. What is now irreparably flawed is nothing less than the whole category o f subjectivity itself, not just som e perversion or estrangem ent o f it. It is this which touches on the guilty secret or impossible paradox o f bourgeois society, that it is exactly in their freedom that men and women are m ost inexorably enchained, that we live immured in our bodies like lifers in a cell. Subjectivity is that which we can least call ou r own. T here was a time when our desires, however destructive, could at least be called ours; now desire breeds in us an illusion known a s reason, in order to con us that its goals are ours too. It is not that Schopenhauer ignores the will’s more creative aspects. I f yawning or yodelling are expressions o f the will, so are all our nobler aspirations; but since they are thus caught up with desire they are part o f the problem rather than the solution. T o fight injustice is to desire, and so to be complicit with that deeper injustice which is

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hum an life. Only by somehow breaking absolutely with this chain o f causality, the terrible sway o f teleology, could true emancipation be achieved. Every bit o f the world, from doorknobs and doctoral dissertations to m odes o f production and the law o f the excluded m iddle, is the fruit o f som e stray appetite locked into the great empire o f intentions and effects; human beings themselves are just walking m aterializations o f their parents’ copulatory instincts. T h e world is one vast extemalization o f a useless passion, and that alone is real. S in ce all desire is founded in lack, all desire is suffering: ‘All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering’ (1, 196). R iddled by the will, the human race is creased over som e central absence like a man doubled up over his ulcer, and Schopenhauer is well aware o f how, in m odem psychoanalytical idiom, desire outstrips need. ‘Fo r one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, dem ands and requests go on to infinity; fulfilment is short and m eted out sparingly’ (1, 196). It is not therefore for the more creative im pulses that we should be searching - not a matter, as with traditional morality, o f ranging our desires on an evaluative scale and pitting the more positive against the m ore destructive. Only the quiescence o f impulse itself would save us; yet to seek such quiescence, in a familiar Buddhist paradox, would be self-defeating. W here then can we turn for a momentary staunching o f this insatiable urge which builds the very stu ff o f our blood-stream and intestines? T h e answer for Schopenhauer is to the aesthetic, which signifies less a preoccupation with art than a transfigured attitude to reality. T h e intolerable tedium o f existence is that we can never burst out o f our own skins, never shuck o ff the straitjacket o f our petty subjective interests. W e drag our egos with us in everything we do, like som e bar-room bore intruding his dreaiy obsessions into the m ost casual conversation. D esire denotes our inability to see anything straight, the compulsive referring o f all objects to our own sectarian interests. Passion ‘tinges the objects o f knowledge with its colour* (2, 141), falsifying the given through hope, anxiety, expectation; and Sch open ­ hauer gives us a hom e-spun little instance o f this victory o f will over intellect by gravely pointing out how, when we do our financial accounts, the unconscious slips we make are almost always to our own advantage. T h e aesthetic is a temporary escape from this prison-

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house o f subjectivity, in which all desire drops away from us and we are able for a change to see the phenomenon as it really is. As we relinquish our heated claim s over it, we dissolve contentedly into a pure, w ill-less subject o f knowledge. But to become a pure subject o f knowledge is paradoxically to cease to be a subject at all, to know o n eself utterly decentred into the objects o f one's contemplation. T he gift o f genius, Schopenhauer writes, is nothing more or less than the m ost complete objectivity. T h e aesthetic is what ruptures for a b lessed moment the terrible sway o f teleology, the tangled chain o f functions and effects into which all things are locked, plucking an object for an instant out o f the clammy grip o f the will and savouring it purely as spectacle. (Dutch interiors, Schopenhauer argues, are flawed aesthetic objects, since their portrayal o f oysters, herrings, crabs, wine and so on m akes us hungry.) T h e world can be released from desire only by being aestheticized; and in this process the desiring subject will dwindle to a vanishing point o f pure dis­ interestedness. B ut such disinterestedness has little in common with an A m oldian large-m indedness, impartially weighing competing interests with an eye to the affirmative whole; on the contrary, it dem ands nothing less than a complete self-abandonm ent, a kind o f seren e self-im m olation on the subject’s part. It is really rather too easy, however, to regard this doctrine as mere escapism . F o r the Buddhist tradition to which Schopenhauer is here indebted, nothing could be more bafflingly elusive than this apparently straightforward matter o f seeing som ething as it is, a naive realism o r (as H eidegger might say) a ‘letting o f things be’ which is never really within our power, and which can occur only spontaneously in a stray moment o f mystical illumination. N or is such realism for Sch openh auer any m ere positivism: on the contrary, he is a fullblooded Platonist on that score, holding that to see things as they are is to grasp them in their eternal essences o r species-being. It is this w ell-nigh im possible realism we can attain in the blessed indifference o f the aesthetic - that state in which the world is transmuted to theatrical charade, its shrieking and howling stilled to so much idle stage chatter for the unmoved spectator’s delighted contemplation. T h e aesthetic is in this sense a kind o f psychical defence mechanism by which the mind, threatened with an overload o f pain, converts the cause o f its agony into innocuous illusion. T h e sublime is therefore the m ost typical o f all aesthetic m oods, allowing us as it does to

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contemplate hostile objects with absolute equanimity, serene in the knowledge that they can no longer harm us. In the sublime, the paranoid ego fantasizes som e state o f triumphal invulnerability, wreaking Olympian vengeance on the sinister forces which would hound it to death. But this ultimate mastery, in which a predatory world is disarm ed to a kind o f fiction, is itself, as Freud taught us, the condition o f death, towards which the battered, pitiable ego is driven for its ultimate self-preservation. T h e Schopenhauerian subject thus m asters its own m urder by suicide, outwits its predators through the prem ature self-abnegation o f the aesthetic. T h e Schopenhauerian aesthetic is the death drive in action, though this death is secretly a kind o f life, Eros disguised as Thanatos: the subject cannot be entirely negated as long as it still delights, even if what it takes pleasure in is the process o f its own dissolution. T h e aesthetic condition thus presents an unsurmountable paradox, as K eats knew in contemplating the nightingale: there is no way in which one can savour one’s own extinction. T h e more exultantly the aesthetic subject experiences its own nullity before the object the more, by that very token, the experience must have failed. Indifference for Schopenhauer is a political as well as aesthetic state o f being; and to this extent he sustains, while also subverting, the classical Schillerian concept o f art as social paradigm . F o r Schopenhauer as for his predecessors, the aesthetic is important because it speaks o f more than itself. T h e detachment or ataraxia we attain for a precious moment in contemplating the artefact is an implicit alternative to appetitive egoism ; art is no mere antithesis to society, but the m ost graphic instance o f an ethical existence beyond the understanding o f the state. Only by somehow piercing the veil o f M aya and recognizing the fictional status o f the individual ego can one behave to others with true indifference - which is to say, make no significant distinction between them and oneself. Satiric detachment is thus at the sam e time loving com passion, a state in which, the prindpium individuationis once unmasked for the ideological fraud it is, selves may be empathetically exchanged. Ju s t as all true knowledge springs from the death o f the subject, so too does all moral value; to act morally is not to act from a positive standpoint, but to act from no standpoint at all. T h e only good subject is a dead one, or at least one which can project itself by empathetic indifference into the place o f every other. It is not a question o f one individual behaving

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considerately towards the next, but o f bursting beyond the whole wretched delusion o f ‘individuality’, in a flash o f what Walter Benjam in would call ‘profane illumination’, to som e non-place unutterably far beyond it. Schopenhauer is thus led beyond the apparatus o f bourgeois legality, o f rights and responsibilities and obligations, since he rejects its prime datum o f the individual subject. Unlike the fetishists o f difference o f our own day, he believes that what human beings share in common is ultimately o f more substance than what distinguishes them. M oral action, like aesthetic knowledge, would thus appear an unthinkable paradox. F o r there can be no practice without a subject; and with subjects come domination and desire. T o speak o f a com passionate subject would seem oxymoronic: even if a purely contemplative benevolence were possible, it could only realize itself in action at the cost o f falling prey to the voracious will. Knowledge and practice would appear as ironically at o d d s for Schopenhauer as ‘theory* and ‘ideology'’ for som e contemporary thought: if there can be no truth without a subject, there can be none with it either. All practice for Schopenhauer inhabits the domain o f illusion: to prosecute my pity for you is in that moment to dispel it, to find m yself writhing instead in the toils o f self-interest. Only by transcending the diseased category o f subjecthood altogether could one individual feel for another; but this very proposition cancels itself out. As William Blake knew, pity and sorrow arc signs that the catastrophe has already happened, and would be unnecessary if it had not. In a society pow ered by appetite, where all action appears irredeemably con­ tam inated, com passion must be banished to the realm o f ‘aesthetic’ contemplation. In one sense, the aesthetic offers us a whole new form o f social life: in its very dispassionate amorality, it teaches us to shed ou r disruptive desires and live humbly, ungreedily, with the simplicity o f the saint. It is thus the first faint glimm erings o f utopia, bearing with it a perfect, virulently misanthropic happiness. But this is not a happiness which could ever be actively realized: like the aesthetic state o f a Schiller, it betrays and undoes itself as soon as it enters upon material existence. It is in any case difficult to know how this state o f disinterestedness could ever com e about. It can obviously not be a product o f the will, since it involves the will’s momentary suspension; but it is hard to see how it can be the work o f the alienated intellect either, and in

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Schopenhauer’s drastically reduced universe there are really no other agents available. H e h im self writes obscurely o f the intellect achieving in these moments a certain ‘temporary preponderance* over the will; but the sources o f this unwonted reversal remain significandy vague. T h e re is positive value in bourgeois society, but its origins are deeply m ysterious. As with the early Wittgenstein, him self a devoted disciple o f Schopenhauer, value cannot really be in the world at all, but must be transcendental o f it.4 T h ere is, it would seem , no way o f shifting from fact to value; and Schopenhauer consequently manoeuvres h im self into an inexplicable duality between the torture cham ber o f history on the one hand, and som e vaguely Hum ean notion o f intuitive affection on the other. In such com passion for others, he writes, we recognize our ‘true and innermost self*; yet we have been told time and again that this innermost se lf is nothing but the ravenous will. Schopenhauer is adam ant that philosophy is quite incapable o f altering human conduct, and disowns all prescriptive intent in his writing. T h ere can be no truck between the cognitive and the ethical, which partake in the eternal enmity o f the representation and the will. Yet his whole philosophy can be read as an implicit disproval o f this claim , suggesting against its own conscious intentions how fact and value, description and prescription may indeed be mutually articulated.

In fact his indebtedness to oriental thought betrays just how ethnocentric the fact/value dichotomy is - how deeply the con­ sequence o f a technological history from which it is admittedly im possible to derive value, since its facts have been constituted from the outset as value’s very negation. T h e Buddhist critique o f the principle o f individuation, by contrast, is at once descriptive and prescriptive - an account o f the way the world is, as well as, indissociably, the recom m endation o f a certain style o f moral behaviour. It is hard to see how a genuine conviction o f the relative insignificance o f distinctions between selves could not affect one’s practical conduct. Schopenhauer would seem to agree that a recognition o f the fictional nature o f identity will show up in one’s actions, while refusing to acknowledge that his own discourse, which speaks o f these matters, might produce such ethical effects. T o do otherwise would be to concede, contrary to one o f his m ajor tenets, that reason can influence the will. On such a remorselessly instrum entalist version o f reason as Schopenhauer’s, this would be

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clearly im possible. Reason is no more than a clumsy calculative device fo r the realization o f desires which are themselves quite insulated from rational debate. T h e lineage from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to contemporary pragmatism in this sense reduplicates the bourgeois m odel o f appetitive man o f H obbes, H um e and Bentham. R eason is the m ere tool o f interest and slave o f desire - interests and desires over which there can be fighting but no arguing. But if what Schopenhauer asserts on this score were true, his own work would be strictly speaking im possible. I f he really credited his own doctrines, Schopenhauer would be unable to write. I f his theory is able to dissect the insidious workings o f the will, then reason m ust be to that extent capable o f curving back on itself, scrutinizing the drives o f which it proclaim s itself the obedient servant. Either he has somehow given the will the slip in his theorizing, or that theorizing is just another o f its futile expressions and so quite valueless. Schopenhauer’s comparison o f philosophy with m usic suggests that he believes the former possibility to be the true one. O f all the arts, m usic is the m ost direct presentation o f the will; indeed it is the will m ade audible, a kind o f delicate, im palpable diagram o f the inner life o f desire, a revelation in non-conceptual discourse o f the pure essen ce o f the world. Any true philosophy is thus no more than a translation into conceptual terms o f what speaks in music, performing rationally what m usic achieves intuitively. A theory which knew the world as it is would thus be characterized by a kind o f aesthetic com pletion, would be an artefact all in itself, resisting discursive divisions and deferm ents so as to represent in its synchronic unity the cohesion o f all things in the will. Philosophy must thus be transcendental; yet the only transcendental reality it seem s to identify is the will itself. It cannot be that philosophy looks at the world from the vantage point o f the will, for then it would be unable to pass any true comm ent on it; so it would appear to b e inspecting the will and all its works from som e other transcendental viewpoint. But since there is no such viewpoint acknowledged in Schopenhauer’s writing, philosophy must be standing in a non-place, speaking from som e location not included within itself. T h ere is indeed such a non-place identified in the theory itself - the aesthetic - but this is not conceptual; and it is hard to see how it can be conceptually translated without falling instantly foul o f the delusions o f the intellect. In short, truth would appear to be possible, but we are quite at a loss to account

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for how this can be so. It can only be that the intellect, in rare, m ysterious moments, seizes a precarious hold on the will o f which it is no more than a m anipulated plaything. T h e se are epistemological dilem m as which Schopenhauer will bequeath to his most fam ous successor, Friedrich Nietzsche. B ourgeois thought tends to construct a recurrent binary opposition between knowledge as the sheer determined reflex o f desire, and knowledge as a form o f sublime disinterestedness. I f the former caricatures the true state o f affairs o f bourgeois civil society, where no reflection would seem innocent o f self-interest, the latter is no m ore than its fantastic negation. Only a dem onic desire could dream such an angelic antithesis. As an increasingly reified, fragmented social order com es gradually to discredit the idea o f its own intelligibility, sublim e disinterestedness m ust be progressively surren­ dered to pragm atist disenchantment. T h e price o f this, however, is that any more ambitious ideological defence o f the society as a whole, uncoupled as it is from particular interests, steadily loses its hold upon social practice. Schopenhauer and N ietzsche are transitional figures in this respect, full-blooded totalizers in one sense yet disenchanted pragm atists in another. C aught in this contradiction, Schopenhauer ends up with a kind o f transcendentalism without a subject: the place o f absolute knowledge is preserved, but it lacks all determinate identity. T h e re can be no subject to fill it, for to be a subject is to desire, and to desire is to be deluded. An idealist philosophy which once dream t o f finding salvation through the subject is now forced to contemplate the unspeakable prospect that no salvation is possible without the wholesale immolation o f the subject itself, the most privileged category o f the entire system. In one sense, o f course, such an abject surrender o f the subject is no more than a routine feature o f the bourgeois social order. Sch openh auer’s empathetic ethics serialize all individuals to equal exchangeability in much the sam e manner a s the market place, if at a som ewhat loftier level. In this most rampantly individualist o f cultures, the individual is indeed little m ore than a fiction, given the blank indifference to it o f the capitalist economy. It is simply that this prosaic levelling o f individual specificity m ust now be sublated to a form o f spiritual communion, disdainfully turned (as in the Kantian aesthetic) against the practical egoism which is in truth its material

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foundation. It is as though the cool disregard for specific identities displayed by the capitalist mode o f production must be dignified to a spiritual discipline, elevated to a tender mutuality o f souls. Yet if this desperate strategy mimes the problem to which it is a solution, its radicalism is at least equally striking. O nce the actual bourgeois subject, rather than its high-minded idealist representation, is placed à fa Schopenhauer at the nub o f theor>\ there seem s no way o f avoiding the conclusion that it must be liquidated. T h ere can be no question any longer o f judicious reform : nothing short o f that revolution o f the subject which is its mystical obliteration will serve to liberate it from itself. T h e philosophy o f subjectivity accordingly selfdestructs, leaving in its wake a numinous aura o f absolute value which is, precisely, nothing. Enthusiastic Kantian though he is, the aesthetic for Schopenhauer signifies in one sense the exact opposite o f what it m eans for his mentor. F o r Kant, as we have seen, the disinterested gaze which read s the world purely as form is a way o f eliciting the object’s enigm atic purposiveness, lifting it out o f the web o f practical functions in which it is enmeshed so as to endow it with som ething o f the self-determ ining autonomy o f a subject. It is by virtue o f this crypto-subjectivity that K an t’s aesthetic object ‘hails’ individuals, speaks meaningfully to them, assures them that Nature is not after all entirely alien to their preoccupations. F o r Schopenhauer, things are quite otherwise: what we glimpse in the aesthetic realm is not yet another image o f our own intolerable subjectivity, but a reality benignly indifferent to our longings. I f for K ant the aesthetic works within the register o f the imaginary, it involves for his successor a gratifying shift to the symbolic, where we can come finally to accept that the object turns its back upon us, has n o need o f us, and is all the better for that. It is as though, having h im self relentlessly anthro­ pom orphized the whole o f reality, discerning analogies o f human appetite in the falling o f a stone or the blowing o f a rose, Sch openh auer’s nausea with that whole monstrously humanized world com pels him to imagine how delightful it would be to look at things as though we were not there. Yet this, o f course, is beyond our reach: the dissolution o f the grasping ego, as we have seen, is also, unavoidably, the ego’s exultant fantasy o f securing an eternal, uninjured existence for itself. Perhaps, then, the aesthetic is no more than the last reckless card the will to live has to play, just as for

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Schopenhauer suicide is simply a sick joke by which the will craftily affirm s itself through the individual’s self-annihilation. T h e dream o f transcending one’s own petty subjecthood is a fam iliar enough idealist fantasy; but it generally turns out to involve a flight into som e higher, deeper form o f subjectivity', with a corresponding gain o f omnipotent mastery. One does not give the slip to the subject simply by collectivizing or universalizing it. Schopenhauer, however, sees that since the subject is its particular perspective, all that can be left behind when this has been surm ounted is a kind o f nothing: the nirvana o f aesthetic contemplation. Even this nothing turns out to be a kind o f something, a negative form o f knowledge; but at least one has now shed the illusion o f a positive mode o f transcendence. All that is left to us is to take pity on the objects o f the world, infected as they are by our own contagious yearnings, and save them from ourselves by som e m iraculous vanishing trick. What is from one viewpoint an irresponsible escapism is thus from another viewpoint the last word in moral heroism. It is in the body, above all, that for Schopenhauer the impossible dilem m as o f existence take on flesh. F o r it is in the body that we are m ost starkly confronted with the clash between the two utterly incompatible worlds in which we live simultaneously. In a rewriting o f K an t’s celebrated dualism, the body which we live from the inside is will, whereas the body as an object am ong others is representation. T h e human subject, that is, lives a unique double relation to its own body as at once noumenal and phenom enal; the flesh is the shadowy frontier where will and representation, inside and outside, come mysteriously, unthinkably together, converting human beings to a kind o f walking philosophical conundrum. T h ere is an unspannable g u lf between our immediate presence to ourselves, and our indirect representational knowledge o f everything else. T h is, o f course, is the m ost banal o f Romantic dichotomies; but Schopenhauer lends it an original inflection. I f he privileges the inward in Romantic style, he nevertheless refuses to valorize it. T h is swift, unmediated knowledge o f ourselves, far from signifying som e ideal truth, is nothing other than our anguished apprehension o f the appetitive will. T h ere is indeed a style o f cognition which by-passes the uncertain labours o f the concept, but it delivers no value whatsoever. M y intuitive presence to m yself is the site o f a problem , not o f som e logocentric solution; and in any case I can know the will at work within my body

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only phenomenally, never in itself. But if the spontaneous and im m ediate are thus brusquely uncoupled from creativity, one o f the central aestheticizing strategies o f bourgeois idealism is cancelled at a stroke. It is not, for Schopenhauer, a question o f elevating a valued form o f cognition over a valueless one, but o f suspending the whole question o f value itself, inextricably bound up as it is with the terrorism o f desire. T h e only true value would be to abolish value altogether. T h is, indeed, is the valueless value o f the aesthetic state the insight that things just are eternally what they are, the mindbending drama o f an object’s sheer identity with itself. T o acknowledge this entails a kind o f intuition; but it is intuition to the second power, a will-less overcom ing o f the spontaneous movement o f will, which allows us to gaze unmoved for a moment into the very heart o f darkness as the objects around us grow m ore luminously replete, m ore satisfyingly poindess, and we ourselves dwindle gradually away to nothing. D espite its dispassionateness, the aesthetic would seem best figured by either weeping or laughing. I f it signifies an infinite fellowfeeling for others, it is also the incredulous cackle o f one who has extricated h im self from the whole squalid m elodram a and surveys it from an Olympian height. T h e se antithetical responses are deeply interrelated, in the tragicomedy o f the Schopenhauerian vision: I su ffer with you bccause I know that your inner stuff* the cruel will, is also my own; bu t since everything is built from this lethal substance, I scorn its futility in a burst o f blasphem ous laughter. T h e aesthetic is the noblest form o f cognitive and ethical truth; but what it tells us is that reason is useless and emancipation inconceivable. As an aporetic state in which one is simultaneously alive and dead, moved and unm oved, fulfilled and erased, it is a condition which has gone beyond all conditions, a solution which testifies in its very contradic tori ness to the impossibility o f a solution. Schopenhauer’s work is thus the ruin o f all those high hopes which bourgeois idealism has invested in the idea o f the aesthetic, even though it remains faithful to the aesthetic as som e ultimate redemption. A discourse which began as an idiom o f the body has now becom e a flight from corporeal existence; a disinterestedness which prom ised the possibility o f an alternative social order is now an alternative to history itself. By some curious logic, the aesthetic has ended up demolishing the very category o f subjectivity it was intended to foster. T h e em barrassing

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rift in a K an t or Schiller between the actual and the ideal, civil society and aesthetic Gemeinschaft, has now been pressed to a destructive extreme, as any practical connection between the two spheres is summarily rejected. Schopenhauer tells in his own dourly universalizing way the plain, unvarnished tale o f bourgeois civil society, in fine disregard for the affirmative ideological glosses; and he is clear-eyed and courageous enough to pursue the grim implications o f this narrative to their scandalous, insupportable conclusions.

Notes 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trs. E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1969), vol. 2, p. 284. All subsequent references to this work are given after quotations in the text. 2 See also, for one of numerous anticipations of Freud, Schopenhauer’s comment that ‘the intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions o f its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions' (2, 209). 3 See Walter Benjamim, ‘Theses on the Philosophy o f History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London, 1970). 4 For the influence o f Schopenhauer on Wittgenstein, sec Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 275-82, and Brian Magee, The Philosophy ofSchopenhauer (Oxford, 1983), pp. 286-315. A somewhat threadbare account of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is to be found in I. Knox, TheAesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (New York, 1958).

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7

Absolute Ironies: Soren Kierkegaard

It Is surprising in a sense that Soren Kierkegaard - ironist, jester, apostle o f the aporetic and enemy o f all totality - has not received m ore attention in a deconstructive age. In another sense, it is hardly surprising at all: for Kierkegaard com bines his devotion to difference, sportive hum our, play with pseudonym s and guerilla-raids on the m etaphysical with a passionately on e-sided commitment, by which few o f our m odem ironists are likely to feel anything but unsettled. In an era when neither existentialism nor evangelical Protestantism are in intellectual fashion, it may be worth casting a glance back at this solitary eccentric, whose power to disturb h as been less weakened by those shifts in fashion than one might have supposed.1 O n e o f K ierkegaard’s many eccentricities is his attitude to the aesthetic. O f the m ajor philosophers from K an t to H aberm as, he is one o f the few who refuse to assign it any predominant value or privileged status. H e thus stands stubbornly askew to the aestheticizing currents o f the m odem European mind, which is not to say that the aesthetic is not from first to last one o f his central preoccupations. For him as for the originators o f the discourse, aesthetics refers not in the first place to art but to the whole lived dim ension o f sensory experience, denoting a phenomenology o f daily life before it com es to signify cultural production. As such, it indicates for K ierkegaard the very hom eland o f inauthenticity. Aesthetic existence is empty abstract immediacy, a zone o f being which predates the tem poral or historical and in which the subject’s actions are only dubiously its own. In this unreflective sphere, akin in som e sense to the Freudian stage o f early infancy, the subject lives in a state o f fragm ented multiplicity, too diffuse to be called a unitary self, unable to differentiate itself from an

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environment o f which it is little more than the determined reflex. D ream ing itself sensuously at one with the world, it confounds its own existence with the sense-im pression in a manner which resem bles the Lacanian register o f the imaginary. M ost social life for Kierkegaard is no more than a higher version o f this sensuous passivity - ‘immediacy with the addition o f a little dose o f selfreflection\ he remarks sardonically in The Sickness unto Death1- since few individuals can rise above their social conditioning to a state o f determinate selfhood. T h e judgem ent o f the world, he comments in his Journals, is not moral but aesthetic, adm iring ‘everything that has power, cunning, selfishness’.3 M iddle-class society has never come o f age, as much the decentred plaything o f its repetitive drives as the sm all infant. T h e aesthetic, then, is in one o f its versions H egel’s ‘bad* immediacy; but it is also, contradictorily, an Hegelian ‘bad’ infinity o f endless self-reflection. T h is ‘higher* or reflective stage o f the aesthetic represents a break with sensuous immediacy - not, however, as a movement upwards into determinate selfhood, but rather as a lapse into som e abyssal specularity, where irony tumbles on the heels o f irony with no more resolute centring o f the subject than can be found in the ‘imaginary* o f bodily immediacy. H am let and Caliban are thus inverted m irror-images o f each other; one is always, in the aesthetic, either too much or too little oneself, ensnared in actuality or adrift in possibility, lacking that dialectical tension between these realm s which is defined by the ethical paradox o f becom ing what one is. Reflectiveness negates immediacy, but thereby shatters it to an infinite indeterminacy not wholly untypical o f immediacy itself. T h e self-reflective subject, as radically empty as the pseudo-self o f aesthetic immediacy, erases temporality and ceaselessly reinvents itself from nothing, seeking to preserve an unbounded freedom which is in truth sheer self-consum ing negativity. T h e name o f this m ode o f existence is irony, o f which the figure o f Socrates is exemplary. Socratic irony raises the subject out o f its mindless comm union with the world, critically unhinging it from the real; but since it yields no positive alternative truth it leaves the subject giddily suspended between actual and ideal, in and out o f the world simultaneously. T h e actual is the ironist’s element, ‘but his course through actuality is hovering and etherial, scarcely touching the ground. As the authentic kingdom o f ideality is still alien to him, so he

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h as not yet em igrated but is at every moment, as it were, about to d epart.’4 S ocrates’s very existence is ironic, an infinite negation o f the social order which is nonetheless still sub-ethical, still to arrive at determ inate subjecthood. Intoxicated by endless possibility, later ‘absolute* ironists such a s Fichte and the Rom antics posit and destroy at a stroke, living subjunctively or hypothetically and so bereft o f all continuity o f self. T h e aesthete-ironist lives actuality as sheer possibility, hubristically usurping the divine prerogative in his im potent freedom to bind and loose. T h e despairing subject o f The Sickness unto Deathy perversely determ ined to be what it is, flamboyantly refashions the whole o f its finite being in the im age o f its arbitrary desire. Su ch aesthetic experim entalism (‘enchanting like an oriental poem ’, Kierkegaard remarks) is a kind o f conjuring o f on eself up ex nihilo at every moment, airily erasing the burden o f historicity and o f the s e lf’s radical givenness. T h e panache o f this artistic selffashioning or giving o f on eself the law thinly conceals its nihilism: if the subject can dissolve this elaborate fabrication to nothing at any m om ent, its omnipotence is at one with its nullity. T h e se lf as perpetual acte gratuit is a mere self-cancelling liberty: ‘irony, like the old witch, constantly m akes the tantalising attempt first to devour everything in sight, then to devour itself too, or, as in the case o f the old witch, her own stom ach.’5 T h e aesthetic as free development o f on e’s multiple powers rests upon a violent, vacuous self^willing. ‘ Im m ediate’ and ‘ reflective’ aestheticism , then, decentre the subject in opposed directions, either flattening it out into external reality or plunging it fruitlessly into its own vertiginous depths. Such contrastive m odes o f aesthetic existence follow from the primary condition o f the Kierkegaardian self, as a contradictory synthesis o f finitude and infinity. O nce this precarious unity splits apart, the subject either takes flight into sensuous finitude, abandoning itself in craven conformity to the social order, o r finds itself m onstrously inflated and volatilized, carried drunkenly outside o f itself in that ‘process o f infinitizing’ whose insidious root is the aesthetic im agination. As an aporetic blending o f necessity and possibility, the unregenerate se lf finds that each o f these dim ensions tends constantly to outrun the other: to will not to be on eself is just as spiritually desperate as to will defiantly to be it, to spurn necessity quite as catastrophic as to deny possibility. I f irony is the joker in the aesthetic pack, the fault-line or

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deconstructive point at which se lf and world are initially uncoupled, then it can be said to provide a threshold between the aesthetic and the ethical. It is the originary splitting or cutting edge which enables the subject to effect its passage from the decentred immediacy o f the aesthetic ‘ imaginary’ to the unified, differentiated state o f the ethical ‘symbolic order*. Socrates in The Concept o f Irony is in this sense a liminal figure, teetering on the very brink o f determinate subjecthood without yet having achieved selfhood a s resolved project and autonom ous decision. Only with Ju d aism will the law or ethical stage proper be ushered in. I f the hollow infinitude o f the ironic recalls the ‘bad* immediacy o f the aesthetic, the two conditions being akin in their utter indeterminacy, the ironic nevertheless negates that immediacy' and so opens up a transition to the ethical. Sin ce irony cannot avoid positing what it negates, it ends up by negating its own negativity and thus allowing the affirmative to appear. It is not, then, that irony is to be rejected; on the contrary, a s we shall sec, it provides the matrix o f much o f Kierkegaard’s own writing. Irony is essential, but as a ‘m astered moment* within the endlessly unfinished process o f truth - a moment which as opposed to ‘bad* infinity ‘limits, renders finite, defines, and thereby yields truth, actuality and content . . . \ 6 Ironizing is not thereby itself negated, brought to an abrupt closure by the act o f commitment; instead, it lives on as the very form o f that commitment, which knows a wry discrepancy between its own intense inw ardness and the external world with which it continues to have practical involvements. Com mitm ent thus raises the ambivalence o f irony to a higher level, preserving som ething o f its sceptical stance towards social reality but combining it with positive belief. T o that extent, irony is sublated to hum our and comedy, which in debunking the world’s pretensions carry with them a deeper positivity than Socratic subversion. T h e re is another m ode o f negativity in Kierkegaard which invades the otherwise replete sphere o f aesthetic immediacy, and this is the experience o f dread. D read is the s e lf’s encounter with its own nothingness, or more particularly our response to that unsettling néant which haunts even the purest sensual lack o f self-consciousness. Even aesthetic immediacy', dream ing its blissful undifferentiation, always already betrays som e elusive negation, which would seem a kind o f dim premonition o f difference, otherness and freedom. It is as though spirit is already glimpsing its own future possibilities within

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the serene self-ignorance o f the aesthetic - as though, in Hegelian term s, the annulment o f immediacy is an immanent movement within im m ediacy itself. T h e very repleteness o f the aesthetic state cannot help being sinisterly suggestive o f lack - not, to be sure, lack o f som ething specific, for then how could this state be said to be replete, bu t an absence necessarily entailed by its own sheer existence. One might describe this uncanny feeling in H eideggerian or Satreian term s, as that nam eless anxiety we experience when the very fullness o f som e object unavoidably calls to mind the non-being it has contingently filled in; or one could picture it alternatively as that moment within the Lacanian imaginary - the dim presence o f the mother beside the child’s m irror-im age, for example which threatens to puncture its coherence. It might even be that Kierkegaardian dread has resonances o f Ju lia Kristeva’s category o f the ‘abject’, that originary experience o f nausea, horror and distaste involved in our first efforts to separate out from the pre-oedipal m other.7 Whatever the appropriate m odel, it is clear that for K ierkegaard there can be no genuine aesthetic, Edenic or pre-oedipal innocence - that the Fall has always already happened, otherwise how would Adam have been able to violate G o d ’s injunction in the first place? A dam ’s disobedience is viewed in The Concept o f Dread as an absurd aporia: it was from his transgression that a knowledge o f difference sprang, so that in this sen se it was the primordial prohibition itself, in Freudian style, which opened up desire; yet A dam could not have fallen unless som e vague pre-understanding o f the possibility o f freedom was already at work within his prelapsarian innocence, to be catalysed by the taboo itself. Adam was thereby awakened to the pure possibility o f freedom , o f the sim ple state o f bein g able, and this is the condition o f dread. D read, IGerkegaard com m ents in strikingly Schillerian terms, ‘ is not a determinant o f necessity, but neither is it o f freedom ; it is a trammelled freedom , w here freedom is not free in itself but tram m elled, not by necessity b u t in itse lf’.8 Like Schiller’s aesthetic condition o f being, dread is undecidably suspended between freedom and necessity; but what for Sch iller was a suprem ely positive state o f nam eless potential is for K ierkegaard a form o f ontological angst. cS in presupposes itse lf’, Kierkegaard writes, m eaning perhaps that its origins are in any temporal sense quite unthinkable. S in has no p lace or source, lying as it does under the sign o f contradiction. T o

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sin is to have been always already able to d o so; and sinfulness is thus as much the ruin o f any rational ethics o r hunt for transcendental origins as the experience o f dread is the immanent negation o f innocence. Certainly any mythological temporalization o f the Fall, as with Paradise Lost, will tend to run headlong into insurmountable paradox, as The Concept o f Dread m akes clear. I f Adam is the source o f original sin then he did not have that taint himself, which puts him outside the race he fathered and thereby excludes him from the fruits o f the Atonement. I f he is the only individual to have no history, then the race stem s from an individual who was not an individual, a fact which annuls the concepts o f both race and individual. How could the hum an race have a source outside itself? And if there can be no transcendental origin which escapes contamination by the history it generates, then there is no originary innocence, and innocence thus springs into the world under the sign o f its own erasure, ‘com es into existence as that which was before it w as annulled and is now annulled’.9 Innocence is thus not a perfection to be recovered, ‘ for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost’.10 Like A dam , we all bring sin into the world; what is originary is not innocence but that structural possibility o f transgression which m ust always already have been present, the anguished awareness o f which is dread. D read is a kind o f floating signifier, a dim primordial sen se o f the possibility o f difference before difference has actually occurred, what Kierkegaard calls ‘freedom ’s appearance before itself in possibility’.11 It is less im m ediacy’s groping apprehension o f som e possibility other than itself than, as it were, the dawning o f the possibility o f possibility itself - le ss the intuition o f an other than the first stirrings o f the very categorial possibility o f otherness. T h ere is a paranoid dimension to this condition, since such otherness is at once intimidating and attractive in its indeterminacy, generating what Kierkegaard calls ‘antipathetic sympathy’. As long as the other remains beyond the s e l f ’s grasp, the subject is unable to define itself and so remains extrinsic to its own being; but the anxiety o f this state is also curiously pleasurable, since for the subject to define itse lf in the other is to find and lose itself simultaneously. T h e se lf’s own nothingness is both alluring and repellent to it, combining a s it does the terrors and seductions o f the sublim e. It is thus not surprising to find K ierkegaard associating dread especially with women, who are similarly both fearful and tempting. D read is a V om anish debility in

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which freedom sw oonsV 2 embodying like the sublime ‘the egoistic infinity o f possibility, which does not tem pt like a definite choice, but alarm s and fascinates with its sweet anxietyV3 In her very sensuous immediacy, her aestheticist lack o f spirit, woman will inspire the néant o f dread and so figure, contradictorily, as a sublime abyss ready to e n g u lf the timorous self. D read is the ‘inexplicable nothing* which shadow s all sensuality, the faintest, purely negative trace o f spirit lurking within it, and thus a suitable image o f the innocent, treacherous female: Even that which, humanly speaking, is the m ost beautiful and lovable thing o f all, a feminine youthfulness which is sheer peace and harmony and joy - even that is despair. F o r this indeed is happiness, but happiness is not a characteristic o f spirit, and in the remote depths, in the m ost inward parts, in the hidden recesses o f happiness, there dwells also the anxious dread which is despair . . . All immediacy, in spite o f its illusory peace and tranquility, is dread, and hence, quite consistently, it is dread o f n o th in g . . .I4 T h e m ore perfect a woman is, in short, the sicker she m ust be - just as the sensuous cheerfulness o f ancient G reece, excluding ‘spirit’ as it does, is for Kierkegaard overshadowed by a profound sorrow. D read is that place where spirit will later be, and which in anticipating its arrival opens up within sensuous pleasure the empty space in which spirit will germinate. T h e aesthetic for Kierkegaard is thus inseparable from disease, even i f such disease is the necessary harbinger o f a transition to the ethical state. Sen suou sn ess is not in itself sinful, The Concept o f Dread insists; but without sin there is no sexuality. T h e recognition o f difference and otherness essential for sexuality to operate are also structural possibilities o f sinfulness; and since without sexuality there can be no history, sin is the precondition o f both. It is in this sen se, then, that sin is original - not as som e transcendental source from which a postlapsarian history flows, but as that ever-present condition o f freedom , difference and otherness which underlies our historical existence. In contrast to the polymorphous indeterminacy o f the aesthetic, the ethical sphere for Kierkegaard signifies antithesis, decision,

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strenuously one-sided commitment. I f the aesthetic subject inhabits a perpetual present, as a kind o f lower parody o f the eternal moment o f faith, the ethical self, through som e im passioned resolution in the present, binds its guilty past (duly acknowledged and repented o f) to a future o f unrealized possibilities. It is thus that it brings itself into being as a determinate, temporally consistent subject, one ‘tensed* in every sense o f the term. T h e paradox o f this project is that the self both does and does not exist prior to this revolutionary crisis o f self­ choosing: for the word ‘choice* to have meaning the se lf must som ehow pre-exist that moment, but it is equally true that it em erges into being only through this act o f decision. Once that decision is taken, as a fundamental orientation o f one’s being rather than as an option for this or that particular, it m ust be ceaselessly re-enacted; and this process o f endless becoming, in which the subject binds together its history into a self-consistent project, might seem in one sen se a form o f aesthetic self-fashioning. W hat distinguishes it from such exotic auto-invention, however, is not only its radical one­ sided n ess, but its openness to all that in the subject which is sheerly given, its inescapable finitude and guilt-ridden temporality. I f ethical self-determ ination is a kind o f aesthetic construct, it is one whose unity is fraught and provisional, whose origin lies beyond its own m astery and whose end is nowhere in view. In any case, it breaks decisively with the inertia o f aesthetic being for the dynamic venture o f becoming, marked as it is by a passionate interestedness which spurns the ataraxy o f the aesthetic as much as it denounces the lofty disinterestedness o f speculative thought. (Hum our, Kierkegaard rem arked, was his own alternative to ‘objective* thought, a more fruitful form o f detachment.) T o live in the ethical is to be infinitely interested in existing - ‘existing* for Kierkegaard signifying a task rather than a donnée, som ething to be achieved rather than received. Aesthetic and theoretical disinterestedness will never yield access to goodness and truth; only an implacable partisanship can hope to do that. T o see life truthfully is to see it neither steadily nor whole; the truth is loaded, tendentious, jealously exclusive in a way no liberal pluralism or aesthetic all-roundedness can com prehend.1s ‘T h at don* is K ierkegaard’s contemptuous tide for the H egel who sought studiously to encom pass every' aspect o f reality within his mighty

totalization. In so far as it is at all possible to distinguish subject and object in

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the sphere o f aesthetic immediacy, this register o f being can be said to involve a mutuality o f inner and outer worlds. It is this symmetrical interchange which the ‘reflective’ aesthetic disrupts: the self-ironizing narcissist either ignores the external world entirely, or treats it merely as the manipulable material o f his fantasies. T h e seducer o f Either/Or is preoccupied with his own erotic strategies, not with the hapless object o f them; his reflectiveness, so to speak, has becom e his immediacy. T o exist ironically is to live a discrepancy between inward and external, ambiguously suspended between one’s negating subjectivity and the world it confronts. T o the extent that the aesthetic is conventionally viewed as a harm onious relation o f subject and object, irony may thus be regarded as an anti-aesthetic m ode. F o r So crates, ‘the outer and the inner did not form a harmonious unity, for the outer was in opposition to the inner, and only through this refracted angle is he to be apprehended.*16 T h e attainment o f the ethical brings with it a turn to the subject, since the only ethically pertinent issue is one’s own inner reality; yet since the ethical also concerns the public sphere, the relation o f the individual to the universal, it recreates a certain ‘aesthetic’ commensurability o f subject and object at a higher level. S u ch , certainly, is the ethical ideology o f Ju d g e Wilhelm o f Either/Ory who finds in marriage a prototype o f the ethical life. M arriage for Wilhelm unites subjective feeling with an objective institution, and in doing so reconciles the antinom ies o f individual and universal, sensuous and spiritual, freedom and necessity, time and eternity. Such ethics are thus the very model o f H egelian synthesis, and as such, for Wilhelm’s author, deeply suspect. ‘T h e Hegelian philosophy’, Kierkegaard writes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ‘culm inates in the proposition that the outward is the inward and the inward is the outward. With this H egel virtually finishes. But this principle is essentially an aestheticm etaphysical one, and in this way the H egelian philosophy is happily finished, or is fraudulendy finished, by lum ping everything (including the ethical and the religious) indiscriminately in the aestheticmetaphysical.’ 17 Wilhelm’s eminently bourgeois ethics, with their values o f work, family, duty and civic obligation, blandly expel all contradiction in their obsessive mediations. A s such they stand under the judgem ent o f Kierkegaard him self in his Journals : ‘let us not speak aesthetically, as i f the ethical were a happy geniality.’18 Wilhelm elevates the ethical above the aesthetic, yet his ethics are modelled on

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the very aesthetic notions they seek to transcend. F o r him, the ethical personality is the truly beautiful, an absolute which like the artefact contains its teleology within itself. T h e ethical life, as a symmetrical m ediation o f subject and object, inward and outward, individual and universal, is a splendidly conflict-free artefact o f autonomously selfdeterm ining particulars; and it is precisely such aestheticized ethics which for Kierkegaard him self will be wrenched open and undermined by religious faith. S u c h faith shatters the smooth m ediations o f the ethical, subverts the complacendy autonom ous se lf and stan ds askew to all merely civic virtue. Its intense inwardness thwarts any equitable interchange o f subject and object, lacking as it does any adequate objective correlative: ‘Christianity is spirit, spirit is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in on e’s eternal happiness.’ 19 T h is ardent subjectivism is relentlessly particular, resistant to all dialectical mediation and universalization. T h e religion o f an ethicist like Wilhelm is no more than an underpinning o f the universal, part o f a rational discourse o f totality which for Kierkegaard is bound to shipwreck on the rock o f faith. Su ch sm ugly idealizing talk is unable fully to acknowledge the realities o f sin and guilt - the fact that before G o d we are always already in the wrong, that the se lf carries a crippling burden o f suffering and injury which cannot be blandly sublated. Sin is the scandal or stum bling block upon which all ‘philosophy* and rational ethics is bound to come a cropper: ‘I f ethics m ust include sin, its ideality is l o s t . . . an ethics that ignores sin is an altogether futile discipline, but once it postulates sin it has co ipso gone beyond itself.’20 T h e crux o f Christian faith, the Incarnation, is similarly the ruin o f all reason - the truth that, in som e mind-warping paradox, the eternally unintelligible Other becam e finite and fleshly. Unlike the H egelian Idea, G o d is sheer impenetrable otherness, and the claim that a m an could incarnate him in time is thus wholly absurd . F o r Kierkegaard there is no necessary relation between time and eternity, which remain spheres quite extrinsic to each other; G o d d o es not, pace H egel, need the world, temporality is no part o f his necessity, and his appearance in history is therefore the breach o f all im m anence and continuity. B ecause G o d is not immanent in time, history is less som e rational, evolutionary totality than a series o f free, contingent events. It is nevertheless with this finite, degraded, empty

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time that the infinite has mysteriously intersected; and the faith o f the individual m ust struggle to appropriate this objective absurdity. Such an appropriation might be seen as the effort towards a higher form o f commensurability between subject and object; but both o f these items are now opaque and aporetic. T h e relation between them is thus fraught with internal contradiction, accentuating the oppositions it momentarily overcomes. I f faith reconstitutes a kind o f unity, and so is to that degree ‘aesthetic’, it is a fissured unity always about to split apart again, and one that has therefore to be ceaselessly reappropriated in that act which Kierkegaard names ‘repetition*. Faith is thus an endless task rather than a triumphant H egelian closure - a kind o f momentary paradoxical overcoming o f the gap between inner and outer, holding fast to the objective in a surge o f intensive inwardness: ‘an objective uncertainty, held fast in the most passionate appropriation o f inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing individual. . . T h e truth is precisely the venture which chooses an objective uncertainty with the passion o f the infinite.’21 T h e ‘knowledge* o f faith is thus a sort o f unity-in-conflict, as the subject binds itself unconditionally to an objective reality it recognizes as problematic. A s such, faith involves a similarly unstable relation to the external world. In abandoning the finite for the infinite, it opens up an abyss between outer and inner; but this gesture is shadowed by a movement o f hope which rediscovers a sort o f workaday commensurability with the world, accepting the finite for what it is in the ironizing light o f infinity. Faith, Kierkegaard comm ents, m ust grasp the eternal but also somehow hold fast to the finite after having given up: ‘T o have one’s daily life in the decisive dialectic o f the infinite, and yet to continue to live: this is both the art o f life and its difficulty.’22 Turning tow ards and away from reality in an endless dual movement, the subject o f faith thus knows at once som ething o f the inner/outer disjunction o f the ‘reflective* aesthetic, and that more harmonious interchange o f subject and object which is the ethical. But this is not a condition to be comfortably inhabited or routinely lived: it can never crystallize into custom or spontaneous habit, and can establish itself as a perm anant, collective, institutionalized form o f life (Hegel*s Sittlichkeit) only at the grave risk o f inauthenticity. Faith for Kierkegaard can never be naturalized in this way, assim ilated to the unconscious mores and traditions o f a social order, and so resists the

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purposes o f political hegemony. I f the ethics o f a Ju d ge Wilhelm are an aestheticized version o f religious belief, reflecting a pleasurable, instinctual conformity to universal law, that belief for his author is at once too dramatically individualist and too perpetually in crisis to oil the wheels o f daily social life. Faith is kairos rather than custom , fear and trem bling rather than cultural ideology. Its absolute disdains the logic o f social evolution and strikes obliquely, apocalyptically into tim e, so that for Kierkegaard as much as for Walter Benjam in every m om ent is the strait gate through which the M essiah might enter.23 N o r does such belief, for all o f its radical individualism, yield much com fort to the autonom ous ego o f the bourgeois ethical sphere. Religious commitment is indeed a question o f free self-determination; bu t in choosing on eself one assum es on e's personal reality in all its unregenerate facticity, as always in the wrong before G od, and as an ultimately unmasterable mysteiy. Only the agonized acknowledgement o f all this which is repentence can unm ake and remake the subject, rather than som e fantasy o f ‘ free’ aesthetic self-invention. T h e se lf for K ierkegaard is a unity o f freedom and necessity, spirit and sense, infinity and finitude; but these antinomies cannot be thought on the m odel o f som e rational dialectic. What is at work in the moment o f faith is som e aporetic, undecidable relation o f freedom and necessity, o f the subject’s utter dependency on that which it nevertheless opts for and actively appropriates. ‘Freedom really only exists because the sam e instant it exists it rushes with infinite speed to bind itself unconditionally by choosing resignation, the choice o f which it is true that in it there is no question o f a choice.*24 Sin ce the commitment o f faith is and is not the subject's own free act, it can be understood neither on the m odel o f aesthetic immediacy, where the se lf can hardly call its actions its own, nor on the pattern o f the self-fashioning bourgeois ego, which would recognize no determinants beyond its own precious liberty. T h e se lf clung to in faith will always remain an enigm a for the rational ego, plagued as it is by contradictions which can be resolved only existentially rather than theoretically, leashed provisionally together in the m om ent-to-m om ent venture o f existence rather than unified in the tranquillity o f the concept or in som e stabilized artefact. Instead o f identity annulling the principle o f contradiction, Kierkegaard writes in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, it is contradiction that annuls identity. T o shift from the aesthetic to the ethical is not to liquidate the

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form er. ‘In choosing itself the personality chooses itself ethically and excludes absolutely the aesthetical, but since it is itself it chooses and it d oes not becom e another being by choosing itself, the whole o f the aesthetical comes back again in its relativity.525 If it is this unregenerate s e lf which the ethical transfigures, then it must have truck with the very aesthetic life-style it upbraids. Sim ilarly, the religious by no m eans merely erases the ethical, but puts it, as Kierkegaard comments, into ‘teleological suspension*. T h e figure o f such suspension is the A braham o f Fear and Trembling, who in his fidelity to a G od beyond all reason com es to stand above and outside the ethicaluniversal realm in a direct, unm ediated relation to the absolute. F o r A braham to sacrifice his son Isaac is to do nothing for the universal would indeed, from this viewpoint, be to com m it m urder - and is thus an act offensive to all Kantian and H egelian reason. Abraham travels beyond the frontiers o f the ethical into that paradoxical territory o f faith where language fails, since if language raises the particular to the general it is itself ineluctably on the side o f the universal. W hat is custom arily thought difficult is not to exist as an individual, but to transcend that paltry egoism and translate o n eself into the universal. F o r K ierkegaard, however, the problem is exactly the other way round. T h e re is a spurious aesthetic facility about the ‘knight o f faith* o f Fear and Trembling who ‘knows it is beautiful and benign to be the particular who translates him self into the universal, the one who so to speak m akes a clear and elegant edition o f himself, as immaculate as possible, and readable for all . . . \ u Su ch aestheticized ethics, speciously translucent and lisible, in which the individual’s conduct becom es luminously intelligible in the light o f the universal, knows nothing o f the harsh opacity o f faith and o f the radical unreadability o f those subsisting in contradiction. It is not in relation to the Kantian universal o f practical reason that A braham ’s lunatic loyalty will becom e decipherable, but in relation to an absolute imperative which can never be speculatively mediated. 4 “ Reality” cannot be conceived,* K ierkegaard rem inds him self in his Jou rn als?1 and elsewhere, ‘the particular cannot be thought.*“ It is this which will be the downfall o f aesthetics - o f the discourse which seeks within the unique particular a kind o f rational structure. T h e folly o f such a project is just the fact that existence is radically heterogeneous to thought - that the whole notion o f a thought supple enough to penetrate lived experience and deliver up its secret is an

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idealist chimera. T h e metaphysical principle o f identity - the identity o f the subject with itself, with objects, with other subjects - crumbles before the fact o f existence itself, which is precisely the anguished separation o f subject and object rather than their spontaneous unity. It follows for Kierkegaard that any trust in the immediate transparency' o f one human subject to another, any dream o f an aesthetic intersubjectivity or empathetic communion o f individuals, rests on this pernicious ideology' o f identity, and corresponds well enough to the abstracdy equKalenced subjects o f the bourgeois ethical and political dom ains. H e writes o f the ‘negative unity o f the mutual reciprocity' o f individuals* in such a social order, and o f ‘levelling’ as the triumph o f abstraction over particular lives.29 Whatever community o f love may be possible in som e higher, religious sphere o f beings who relate to each other through the absolute o f faith, it remains true o f secu lar history that human subjects are profoundly impenetrable and inaccessible to one another. T h e reality o f another for me is never a given fact, only a ‘possibility*, which I can never mimetically appropriate as my own. T h at imaginative, empathetic imitation which for earlier thinkers was the very foundation o f human sociality is here abruptly dism issed; there can be no direct communication between irreducibly particular individuals. N o subject’s inwardness can be known other than indirecdy: all believers are, like Je su s, ‘incognitos’, caught in an ironic discrepancy between their passionate, secretive subjectivity and their bland appearance to others as citizens o f the public world. Faith, and the individual, are that which cannot be represented, and so are at root anti-aesthetic. T h e new development o f the age, Kierkegaard writes in his Journals, cannot be political, for politics is a question o f the dialectical relation o f individual and community in the representative individual, and ‘in our times the individual is in the process o f becom ing far too reflective to be able to be satisfied with merely being represented.,J0 Politics and aesthetics thus fall together: both are given over to the fruitless task o f seeking to subsum e the specific within the abstract universal, and so simply annul what they strive to sublate. I f K ierkegaard is not to be caught in a performative contradiction, then it follows that what he asserts o f the impossibility o f direct communication must logically apply to his own writings too. It is this which necessitates his play o f pseudonym ous personae, as a set o f

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guerilla-raids on the reader’s false consciousness, a crabwise skirm ishing whereby the reader must be approached obliquely, duplicitously, if genuine enlightenment is to dawn. T h e author cannot appear as som e brash ‘town crier o f inw ardness’ but must practise instead a kind o f Socratic ignorance, as the feigned or fictive pre­ condition o f the reader’s true ignorance becom ing revealed to him. K ierkegaard’s writerly strategy thus resem bles that o f a revolutionary propagandist in hard political times who prom ulgates a stream o f pam phlets which do no more than question the limits o f her readership’s left-leaning liberalism. Rather than confront the reader with an absolute truth which would only be rejected, Kierkegaard must covertly enter the reader’s own viewpoint in order to deconstruct it from the inside, ‘going along with the other’s delusion’, as he puts it, so as to deceive them into the religious dom ain. H e speaks therefore o f his pseudonym ous works as his ‘aesthetic production’: i always stand in an altogether poetic relation to my work, and I am, therefore, a pseudonym .’31 I f the reader is presum ed to inhabit the aesthetic sphere, driven by wayward im pulse rather than ethically resolute, then as Kierkegaard comments in My Point o f View as an Author it would hardly be appropriate to break rudely in on him with a direct discussion o f Christianity. Instead, one invites the reader to debate aesthetics, and arrives at the truth in that sideways movement. I f truth itse lf is resolutely subjective, then its conveyance dem ands som e more circum spect m edium than the language o f scientific objectivity. T h at m ore underhand m ode is the aesthetic, involving as it does ‘an aw areness o f the form o f the communication in relation to the recipient’s possible misunderstanding’.32 An aesthetic discourse is one which revises and reflects back upon itself in the very act o f enunciation, an utterance raised to the second power which overhears itse lf in the ears o f its recipients. I f it is true that ‘all receiving consists in producing’,33 then writing must reach out to engage the freedom o f its readers to accept or reject the offered truth as they wish, thus figuring in its very structure something o f the cryptic, undemonstrable, non-apodictic nature o f truth itself. W riting which was not in this sen se radically dialogical, constituted in its very letter by a putative readeriy response, would cancel in its very form the emancipatory content o f the truth it proffered. T ru th and irony, passionate commitment and serpentine scepticism, are therefore for Kierkegaard accom plices rather than antitheses o f one another; it is not that truth

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is dialogical ‘in itself*, but rather that its very relendess absolutism renders it unreadable for a fallen history and so constrains it to reem erge as irony, deception and feigned ignorance. T h e problem is not that truth is ‘indeterminate*; it is quite determinate enough, but simply absurd. As such, it can be encompassed neither by the ideology o f self-identity nor by the dogmatism o f an endless deconstructive irony. N or is it the case that Kierkegaard h im self has secure access to the truth but entices others into it by cunning propagandist ploys, since there can be no secure access to a truth appropriated in fear and trembling. I f truth is that which can be lived but not known, then this m ust apply just as much to Kierkegaard’s own experience o f it as to that o f his readers. T ru th defeats all mediation and so is apprehended instantly or not at all; but since it defeats mediation there is nothing that can be direcdy said about it, which m eans that it is determinate and indeterminate, ironic and self-identical, at one and the sam e time. I f the content o f truth is also its form - if truth exists only in the process o f its free appropriation - then ‘the mode o f apprehension o f the truth is precisely the truth*,34 which would seem to confer on truth that indissociability o f form and content which belongs to the aesthetic. Process and end-product, as with the aesthetic artefact, are profoundly at one; and in this sense faith does not leave the aesthetic entirely behind, but re-enters and repossesses it like a fifth columnist for its own ulterior motives. T h e religious resem bles the ironic or reflective aesthetic in its disproportioning o f inner and outer; but it also parallels aesthetic immediacy, recreating the dense opacity o f the sen suou s at a higher spiritual level. Both faith and aesthetic immediacy thus resist that violent dissolution o f specificity to universality which is the ethical. T h e subject o f faith, as a kind o f spontaneous relation o f particular to absolute without the mediation o f universal law, might therefore be said to be a sort o f artefact in itself, working as it does by intuition rather than by reason; and its m ysteriousness might then be read as a version o f the Kantian aesthetic representation, which similarly fu ses the particular with a greater ‘law* while outflanking the mediatory concept. I f for idealist thought the aesthetic transm utes temporal existence into the form o f its eternal essence, then there is a sense in which Kierkegaardian b e lie f might be viewed as an aesthetic mode o f being; but the contrasts between the two spheres are finally more striking than the

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analogies. F o r faith is always untotalizcd and internally fissured, agitated by paradox and contradiction in a way foreign to the achieved aesthetic product; and this state o f continuous crisis and agonized renewal estranges it, as we have seen, from all mere social custom and civic virtue. Religious engagement resists all translation to the sedate m ilieu o f a taken-for-granted cultural legacy - to the institutional space in which, living their conformity to the law as instinctual pleasure, men and women becom e the ‘self-governing’ subjects o f bourgeois hegemony. Kierkegaard has nothing but contempt for the ‘public opinion’ or collective mores o f bourgeois social theory, and rips H e g el’s unity o f morality and happiness rudely apart. T h e religious h as nothing to do with well-being or sensuous fulfilment, and is thus a critique o f the aesthetic in this sense too. T h e true Christian, Kierkegaard writes, is one who ‘calls one away from the physical m an’s pleasure, life and gladness’;3S faith is ‘ no aesthetic emotion, but som ething far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination o f the heart but the paradox o f existence’.36 F o r Kierkegaard there can be no Shaftesbury-like path from the heart’s affections to the absolutes o f ethics, and the religious sen se has little in common with aesthetic taste. Poetry for faith is ‘a beautiful and amiable jest, whose consolation religiousness nevertheless spurn s, because the religious com es to life precisely in suffering’.36 T h e re is a kind o f ‘poet-existence’ which, as Fear and Trembling insists, is ‘ the sin o f poeticising instead o f being, o f standing in relation to the G ood and the T ru e through imagination instead o f b ein g that, or rather o f existentially striving to be it’.37 T h e poetic is idealist speculation rather than religious activism; and even the aesthetic register o f the sublime is a poor image o f divine transcendence.38 K ierkegaard’s writing goes back beyond H egel’s collectivized ‘ethical life*, which seeks to blend duty and desire, to K ant’s rigorous duality o f happiness and moral rectitude; but it does so in ways which underm ine both the autonomous subject o f Kantian ethics, and the unity o f that subject with others in the universal. We have seen already how the individual believer is no m ere conferer o f a rational law upon itself, swept up as it is in abject dependency upon a grace whose logic entirely defeats it. T h e uncom prom ising inwardness o f this then ruptures the links between individuals, who become indecipherable at once to each other and to themselves; and in doing

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so it threatens to subvert any conceivable structure o f sociality. T h e aestheticized politics o f the bourgeois public sphere rests on a harm onious reflection o f autonom ous subjects one in the other, as the inwardness o f each is mediated through ‘ concrete ethics’ to their collective social existence and then back to the individual. It is this fluent continuity o f inward and outward which Kierkegaard’s ferocious individualism abruptly suspends; and the result is a shattering o f that imaginary register in which individuals may find themselves reflected and reassured by the world around them. T h e believer can never feel ideologically centred in this way: ‘finite experience’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘is hom eless’.39 T here can be no objective correlative o f a subjectivity lived at this pitch o f passionate intensity; and the subject is accordingly thrust beyond the world, sustaining a merely ironic relation with it, a permanent thorn in the flesh o f all purely institutional life. T h e paradox o f Kierkegaard’s work is that it seizes upon the rampant individualism o f bourgeois society and p resses it to an unacceptable extrem e, at which the social and ideological unity o f that order begin to come apart at the seam s. In a further paradoxical turn, this subversion takes place before any such individualism has installed itse lf in D anish society on a significant scale. T h at society is still in K ierkegaard’s time one o f monarchical absolutism , unaltered in many o f its social practices since the middle ages. D enm ark’s entry into the nineteenth century was marked by a series o f cataclysms: the physical devastation wrought by the Napoleonic wars, the state bankruptcy o f 1813, the loss o f Norway one year later, the economic failures and food shortages o f the 1820s. By the 1830s, Frederik V i’s rigidly conservative kingship held autocratic sway, brutally suppressing the slightest expression o f liberal thought. D espite som e earlier reformist legislation, which broke the bondage o f peasant to landholder and established a rudimentary system o f public education, the Denm ark o f Kierkegaard’s day remained politically oppressive and culturally benighted, a traditionalist agrarian society still several decades away from industrialization. While church and censorship stifled intellectual life, a guild system in the townships thwarted commercial development. Within this restrictive carapace, however, the forces o f social progress were tentatively assembling. Newly aware o f itself as a corporate social power, the Danish peasantry pressed for greater land

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reform , and through its representative association the Bondevntncma Selskab (Society o f Friends o f the Fan n ers) secured a limited program m e o f agrarian improvement in the late 1840s. Farm ers’ credit societies, the forerunners o f Danish agricultural cooperativlsm, assisted peasants to purchase their own smallholdings; and this gradual liberalization o f the countryside was coupled in Copenhagen with a rising tide o f allegiance to the liberal trade principles o f British bourgeois political economy. In 1857, reforming legislation dismantled the D anish guild system and swept away the ancient monopoly o f trade in the market towns. 1844 had witnessed the arrival o f railways in the country*, contributing by the 1860s to a significant opening up o f free internal trade. As improved popular education and cultural revival movements gradually raised the political consciousness o f the peasantry, m iddle-class liberal intellectuals struggled throughout the 1830s and 1840s for constitutional reform , appealing to the benevolent despotism o f Christian VIII for male suffrage and an elected legislature. By 1849 such a liberal constitution was finally declared, guaranteeing freedom o f speech, religious tolerance and other civic liberties throughout the realm. T h ere had been, however, no m iddle-class industrial revolution; indeed Denm ark possessed little organized industry, and the national bourgeoisie, lacking an econom ic base and daunted by the leaden conservatism o f church and state, pursued its own m oderate interests in that spirit o f timorous conform ity and calculative prudence which Kierkegaard was to denounce as the sign o f a passionless age. A fierce opponent o f the National L iberals, Kierkegaard him self w as a full-blooded apologist for the forces o f political reaction.40 Elitist, puritanical and bitterly misogynistic, he defended censorship, church and monarchy, railed intemperatcly against the ‘m ob’ and adhered to an orderly hierarchical structure which would reflect G o d ’s rule over creation. Liberal reform ism ’s call for equality meant a m ere abstract levelling, undermining concrete social bonds and annihilating the pure differences o f individual life. H is Lutheran combination o f social conservatism and extrem e individualism, that is to say, took the regressive ideological form o f an im passioned plea for the socially specific individual, loyal offspring o f family, profession, religion and fatherland, in the teeth o f the abstractly universal subject o f bourgeois social theory. In thus turning individualism against bourgeois society itself, Kierkegaard exposes that society’s real anti­

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social character, cloaked as it is by its political and spiritual rhetoric. H is social criticism springs not from insisting in idealist style on ‘community’ as against egoism, but from exploring that egoism at so profoundly serious a depth that the abstract individual o f market society is transformed into an irreducible particular which resists all social integration. Nothing could in truth be more abstract than this solitary Kierkegaardian self, bereft o f all history and culture; yet this speciously ‘concrete’ subject becom es the ruin o f all social consensus, the stumbling block to bourgeois solidarity. Before the proper em ergence o f m iddle-class power in Denm ark, Kierkegaard has already in a pre-emptive strike unmasked one o f its major contra­ dictions: the fact that its enthronement o f the uniquely valuable individual in the ideological sphere is ceaselessly, ironically subverted by its reduction o f that individual to an arbitrarily interchangeable cypher in the economic and political dom ains. In som e sense, then, it is the very reactionary character o f his thought - its scorn for the public sphere, its strident subjectivism, its patrician disdain (prefiguring N ietzsche and H eidegger) for the faceless ‘m ass m an’ o f m odem homogenized society - which turns out to b e most explosively radical. Som ething o f the sam e may be said o f the repressive puritanism o f this ascetic D ane, with his dour suspicion o f the sen ses and bitter hostility to the body. Sensation, the life o f corporeal pleasure, figures in his work as the aesthetic realm o f m indless m iddle-class appetite, the sluggish, self-satisfied Lebenswelt o f bourgeois Copenhagen. A s a spiritual individualism, Kierkegaardian faith sets itself at once against the life o f degraded desire (bourgeois civil society) and against all vacuously idealist universalism (the bourgeois ethical and political spheres). H is strategy, in short, is to split into two parts the conventional concept o f the aesthetic, which reconciles sensory experience with the spiritually universal. T h e former dimension then appears in itself, shorn o f all edifying universality, as the aesthetic; the latter form o f abstract idealism takes up its home in the world o f the ethical. In this way bourgeois society is doubly exposed, even before it has properly got under way, as both grossly particularist and vacuously unspecific. Kierkegaard’s vehement anti-Hegelianism rips the sensuous from the spiritual and the particular from the universal, thereby challenging all aestheticizing solutions to social dilemmas. T h e Baum gartenian effort to render the sensuous particular trans­ parent to reason - the very foundation o f m odem aesthetics - is thus

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decisively undone. T o this extent K ierkegaard, for all his religious absolutism , is not entirely remote from the materialist logic he found so spiritually offensive. N or is his work a s irrelevant as might be thought to the present age, trapped as it is between the ‘bad* infinity o f deconstructive irony and certain too closed, over-totalizing theories o f the political subject. T h e subject o f faith, abandoning the solace o f an idealist ethics, aware o f itself as radically hom eless and decentred, turns its horror-stricken face to its own guilty implication in the crime o f history', and in that crisis o f revolutionary' repentence or metanoia is freed to seize upon certain transformative possibilities for the future. G ripped by a one-sided commitment scandalous to liberal pluralism, yet living also in the fear and trembling o f irresolvable ambiguity, it is forced to acknowledge otherness and difference, the whole realm o f the unmasterably particular, at the very instant that it seeks strenuously to remake itself in some fundamental, exclusive orientation o f its being. At once dependent and self-determ ining, it appropriates its own ‘nothingness* and becom es in that act, but always precariously and provisionally, an historically determinate being. I f the subject lives in intense seriousness it is also necessarily comic and ironic, knowing its own revolutionary' option to be mere foolishness in the w orld’s eyes and secretly delighting in that incongruity while m aintaining the gravest o f public miens. Ready to abandon its identity in the trust that som e unfathomable w isdom might flow from such folly, it nonetheless forgoes the ‘bad’ utopianism o f any final synthesis for an endlessly unfinished existence. But that openendedness is a self-resolution continually renewed, rather than a spiral o f evasive self-ironizing. It is not the one-sidedness o f the age which is to be criticized, K ierkegaard remarks, but rather its abstract one-sidedness. Purity o f heart is to will one thing; and an authentic existence must therefore reject the alluring all-roundedness o f the aesthetic, the belief that the good lies in the rich, multiple unfolding o f human powers. It is in this sen se that commitment and the aesthetic are for Kierkegaard irreconcilable. F o r an alternative viewpoint - a one-sided engagement as unwavering as Kierkegaard’s, but one in the cause o f all-round creative development - we must turn to the work o f K arl M arx.

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Notes 1 Useful general studies of Kierkegaard include Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind ofPoet (Philadelphia, 1971); John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works (Princeton, 1975); Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship (Princeton, 1975), 2X\dJourneys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980); Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel (Princeton, 1980); and Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton, 1985). For an intricate critique of the abstractness o f the Kierkegaardian individual, see Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Frankfurt, 1973). 2 Seren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, translated with an Introduction by Walter Lowrie (New York, 1954), p. 191. 3 The Journals of Seren Kierkegaard: A Selection, edited and translated by Alexander Dru (London, 1938), p. 385. 4 Seren Kierkegaard, The Concept ofIrony, translated with an Introduction by Lee M. Capel (New York, 1965), p. 158. 5 Ibid, p. 92. 6 Ibid, p. 338. 7 See Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour (Paris, 1983), pp. 27-58. 8 Seren Kierkegaard, The Concept ofDread, translated with an Introduction by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1944), p. 45. 9 Ibid., p. 33. 10 Ibid., p. 34. 11 Ibid., p. 99. 12 Ibid., p. 55. 13 Ibid., p. 55. 14 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 158. 15 Which is not to say that liberal pluralism has not tried to appropriate Kierkegaard, as the pious flourish on which Mark C. Taylor concludes his Journeys to Selfhood well exemplifies: ‘Unity within plurality; being within becoming; constancy' within change; peace within flux; identity within difference: the union of union and nonunion - reconciliation in the midst of estrangement. The end o f the journey to selfhood’ (p. 276). Though it is hard to tell what this string o f vacuous slogans actually means, one suspects it has more to do with contemporary North American ideology than with nineteenth-century Denmark. 16 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, p. 50. 17 Seren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, introduced by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1941), p. 186.

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18 Kierkegaard, Journals, pp. 186-7. 19 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 33. 20 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, pp. 16-17, and Fear and Trembling, p. 124. 21 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 182. 22 Ibid., pp. 78-80n. 23 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London, 1973). 24 Kierkegaard, Journals, p. 371. 25 Sorcn Kierkegaard, Either/Or, translated by Walter Lowric (Princeton, 1944), vol. 2, p. 150. 26 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 103. 27 Kierkegaard, Journals, p. 373. 28 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 290. 29 Quoted in Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, p. 57. 30 Kierkegaard, Journals, p. 151. 31 Ibid., p. 132. 32 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 70. 33 Ibid., p. 72. 34 Ibid., p. 287. 35 Kierkegaard, Journals, p. 363. 36 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 390. 37 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 208. 38 See Kierkegaard, Journals, p. 346, where he scorns the sublime as a kind o f ‘aesthetic accountancy’. 39 Quoted in Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, p. 64. 40 A singularly unconvincing attempt to qualify Kierkegaard’s reactionary politics can be found in Michael Plekon, ‘Towards Apocalypse: Kierkegaard’s Two Ages in Golden Age Denmark,’ in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages (Macon, 1984).

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8

The Marxist Sublime

In the narrative so far, the aesthetic as a kind o f incipient materialism would not seem to have fared particularly well. Indeed there is a sense in which what we have seen so far as the aesthetic might more accurately be described as an anaesthetic. Kant expels all sensuousness from the aesthetic representation, leaving behind only pure form; as Pierre Bourdieu and Alain D arbel remark, Kantian aesthetic pleasure is ‘an empty pleasure which contains within itself the renunciation o f pleasure, a pleasure purified o f pleasure’.1 Schiller dissolves the aesthetic into som e rich creative indeterminacy, at odds with a m aterial realm it is nevertheless intended to transform. H egel is fastidiously selective about the body, endorsing only those o f its sen ses which seem somehow intrinsically open to idealization; while in the hands o f a Schopenhauer the aesthetic ends up as an im placable refusal o f material history itself. I f Kierkegaard turns back to the aesthetic sphere, it is in largely negative mood: the aesthetic, once the very consummation o f beauty, is now in effect synonymous with idle fantasy and degraded appetite. A discourse which set out with Baum gartcn to reconcile sense and spirit has been left starkly polarized between an anti-sensuous idealism (Schopenhauer) and an unregenerate materialism (Kierkegaard). I f this is the case, then it would seem that the only fruitful strategy is to go back to the beginning and think everything through again, but this time from the standpoint o f the body itself. T h e implicit materialism o f the aesthetic might still be redeem able; but if it can be retrieved from the burden o f idealism which weighs it down, it can only be by a revolution in thought which takes its starting-point from the body itself, rather than from a reason which struggles to make

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room for it. What if an idea o f reason could be generated up from the body itself, rather than the body incorporated into a reason which is ahvays already in place? What if it were possible, in a breathtaking wager, to retrace one’s steps and reconstruct everything - ethics, history, politics, rationality - from a bodily foundation? T h at such a project would be fraught with perils is undeniable: how could it safeguard itself from naturalism, biologism , sensuous empiricism, from a mechanical materialism or false transcendentalism o f the body every bit as disabling as the ideologies it seeks to oppose? How can the human body, itself in part a product o f history, be taken as history’s source? D o es not the body in such an enterprise become sim ply another privileged anteriority, as spuriously self-grounding as the Fichtean ego? T h e re might, nevertheless, be som e way o f working laboriously upw ards from the opposing thumb or the oral drive to mystical ecstasy and the military-industrial complex. And it is just this kind o f project which the three greatest ‘aestheticians* o f the m odem period - M arx, N ietzsche and Freud - will courageously launch: M arx with the labouring body, Nietzsche with the body a s power, Freud with the body o f desire. How one can even speak o f such theorizing is then an im m ediate question; for what is one to say o f a form o f thought which denies itself? D enies itself, that is, as any autonom ous reality, returning us instead to the bodily interests from which it was generated. ‘T h e element o f thought itself,’ writes K arl M arx, ‘the elem ent o f the vital expression o f thought, language, is sensuous nature.*2 I f a materialist discourse does not necessarily betray its own prem ises in the act o f articulation, it is because, as M arx suggests, theoretical reflection m ust itself be grasped as material practice.

‘Sense perception*, writes M arx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM ), ‘must be the basis o f all science. Only when science starts out from sense perception in the dual form o f sensuous consciousness and sensuous need - i.e. only when science starts out from nature - it is real science. T h e whole o f history is a preparation, a development, for “man” to become the object o f sensuous consciousness and for the needs o f “ m an as m an” to become (sensuous) needs.*3 Alm ost a century after Alexander Baum garten’s proclamation o f a new science, M arx calls for its reinvention. But the aesthetic, that

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hum ble prosthesis o f reason, has here supplanted with a vengeance what it was supposed to supplem ent. S en se perception, to be sure; but as the basis o f all knowledge? And how is this more than a vulgar empiricism? M arx will devote much o f the EPM to thinking history and society through again, this time from the body upwards. Elaine S carry has remarked on how M arx throughout his writings ‘assum es that the world is the human being’s body and that, having projected that body into the made world, men and women are themselves disem bodied, spiritualised*.4 T h e system o f economic production, as Scarry points out, is for M arx a kind o f materialized metaphor o f the body, as when he speaks in the Grundrisse o f agriculture as a conversion o f the soil into the body’s prolongation. Capital acts as the capitalist’s surrogate body, providing him with a vicarious form o f sentience; and i f the ghostly essence o f objects is exchange-value, then it is their material use-value, as M arx again comments in the Grundrisse, which endows them with corporeal existence. T h e story M arxism has to tell is a classically hubristic tale o f how the human body, through those extensions o f itself we call society and technology, com es to overreach itself and bring itself to nothing, abstracting its own sensuous wealth to a cypher in the act o f converting the world into its own bodily organ. T h at this tragedy should occur is not, o f course, a mere question o f technological overweening but o f the social conditions within which such techno­ logical development takes place. Since these are conditions o f struggle, in which the fruits o f labour are fiercely contested, there is need for a range o f social institutions which will have, am ong other functions, the task o f regulating and stabilizing these otherwise destructive conflicts. T h e mechanisms by which this can be accom plished - repression, sublimation, idealization, disavowal - arc as fam iliar to psychoanalytical as to political discourse. Yet the strife over the appropriation and control o f the body’s powers is not so easily quelled, and will inscribe itself within the very institutions which seek to repress it. Indeed this struggle is so urgent and unrem itting that it ballasts the whole o f that institutional history, warping it out o f true and skewing it out o f shape. T h is process, whereby a contention over the body’s powers com es to trace our intellectual and institutional life to its roots, is known to M arxism as the doctrine o f base and superstructure. Like the neurotic symptom, a superstructure is that place where the repressed body succeeds in

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m anifesting itself, for those who can read the signs. Bodies o f a certain kind - ‘prematurely* bom , potentially communicative, needing to labour - produce, unlike other animal bodies, a history; and M arxism is the narrative o f how that history slips from the body’s grasp, thrusting it into contradiction with itself. T o describe a particular form o f body as historical is to say that it is continuously able to make something o f that which m akes it. Language is in this sen se the very index o f human historicity, as a system whose peculiarity is to enable events which transgress its own formal structure. But one aspect o f this unfathomable capacity for selftransgression, on the part o f the linguistically productive animal, is the power to extend its body into a web o f abstractions which then violate its own sensuous nature. I f M arx can call for a sensuously based science without lapsing into com m onplace empiricism, it is because the senses for him are less som e isolable region, whose ‘laws* might then be rationally inspected, as the form o f our practical relations to reality. ‘T h e objectivity o f the possible objects o f experience*, writes Jü rg en H aberm as, ‘is thus ( for M arx] grounded in the identity o f a natural substratum , namely that o f the bodily organisation o f man, which is oriented towards action, and not in an original unity o f apperception . . .V S en se perception for M arx is in the first place the constitutive structure o f human practice, rather than a set o f contemplative organs; indeed it can becom e the latter only in so far as it is already the former. Private property is the ‘sensuous expression* o f humanity’s estrangement from its own body, the dismal displacement o f our sensuous plenitude onto a single drive to possess: 'all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangem ent o f all these senses the sense o f having. S o that it might give birth to its inner wealth, hum an nature has been reduced to this absolute poverty.*6 W hat com es about under capitalism for the young M arx is a kind o f splitting and polarizing o f sensory life in two antithetical directions, each a grotesque travesty o f the authentically sensuous body. At one level, capitalism reduces the bodily fullness o f men and women to a ‘crude and abstract simplicity o f need* — abstract because, when sh eer material survival is at stake, the sen suous qualities o f the objects intended by such needs are not in question. In Freudian parlance, on e might say that capitalist society collapses the drives, by which the hum an body transcends its own boundaries, to the instincts - those

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fixed, monotonously repetitive urges which incarcerate the body within its own frontiers: By reducing the worker’s needs to the paltriest minimum necessary to maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement . . . the political economist declares that man has no other needs, either in the sphere o f activity or in that o f consumption . . . H e turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turns the worker’s activity into a pure abstraction from all activity.7 B u t if the capitalist strips the worker o f his senses, he equally confiscates his own: ‘T h e less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will becom e the treasure which neither moths nor m aggots can consum e - your capital.* T h e signal advantage o f the capitalist over the worker is that the former operates a kind o f double-displacem ent. Having alienated his sensory life to capital, he is then able vicariously to recuperate that estranged sensuality by the power o f capital itself: ‘everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you: it can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theatre, it can appropriate art, learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is capable o f doing all these things for you. . . .’9 Capital is a phantasmal body, a monstrous Doppelgänger which stalks abroad while its m aster sleeps, mechanically consum ing the pleasures he austerely forgoes. T h e m ore the capitalist forswears his self-delight, devoting his labours instead to the fashioning o f this zom bie-like alter ego, the more second-hand fulfilments he is able to reap. Both capitalist and capital are im ages o f the living dead, the one anim ate yet anaesthetized, the other inanimate yet active. I f a brutal aesceticism is one aspect o f capitalist society, its inverted m irror-im age is a fantastic aesthedcism . Sensory existence is stripped to skeletal need at one level only to be extravagantly inflated at another. T h e antithesis o f the blindly biologistic wage-slave is the exotic idler, the self-pleasuring parasite for whom ‘the realisation o f m an ’s essential powers is simply the realisation o f his own disorderly existence, his whims and his capricious and bizarre notions’.10 I f the worker is devastated by need, the upper-class lounger is crippled by

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the lack o f it. D esire, unconstrained by material circumstance, becom es in him perversely self-productive, a matter o f ‘refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites’ which cynically luxuriate in their own supersubtlety. Su ch a figure is for M arx the social correlative o f philosophical idealism, as indeed, paradoxically, is that most prosaically m aterial o f all phenomena, money. M oney for M arx is idealist through and through, a realm o f chimerical fantasy' in which all identity is ephem eral and any object may be transmuted at a stroke to any other. Like the imaginary appetites o f the social parasite, money is a purely aesthetic phenomenon, self-breeding, self-referential, autonom ous o f all material truth and able to conjure an infinite plurality o f worlds into concrete existence. T h e human body under capitalism is thus fissured down the m iddle, traumatically divided between brute materialism and capricious idealism, either too wanting or too whimsical, hacked to the bone or bloated with perverse eroticism . T h e dialectical point, as one would expect, is that each o f these opposites brings the other into existence. N arcissism and necessity, fam ished and exorbitant appetites, arc (as T h eodor Adorno m ight have said) the tom halves o f an integral bodily freedom, to which however they do not add up. T h e goal o f M arxism is to restore to the body its plundered pow ers; but only with the supersession o f private property will the sen ses be able to com e into their own. I f comm unism is necessary, it is because we are unable to feel, taste, sm ell and touch as fully as we might: T h e supersession o f private property is therefore the complete emancipation o f all human sen ses and attributes; but it is this emancipation because these sen ses and attributes have becom e human, subjectively as well as objectively. T h e eye has becom e a human eye, just as its object has becom e a social, human object, made by man for m an. T h e sen ses have therefore becom e theoreticians in their immediate praxis. T h ey relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to m an, and vice-versa. N ee d or enjoyment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its m ere utility in the sense that its use has becom e human u se.11

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M arx is m ost profoundly ‘aesthetic’ in his belief that the exercise o f human senses, powers and capacities is an absolute end in itself, without need o f utilitarian justification; but the unfolding o f this sensuous richness for its own sake can be achieved, paradoxically, only through the rigorously instrumental practice o f overthrowing bourgeois social relations. Only when the bodily drives have been released from the despotism o f abstract need, and the object has been similarly restored from functional abstraction to sensuusly particular use-value, will it be possible to live aesthetically. Only by subverting the state will we be able to experience our bodies. Sin ce the subjectivity o f the human senses is a thoroughly objective affair, the product o f a complex material history, it is only through an objective historical transformation that sensuous subjectivity might flourish: Only through the objectively unfolded wealth o f human nature can the wealth o f subjective human sensitivity - a musical ear, an eye for the beauty o f form, in short, senses capable o f human gratification - be either cultivated or created. F o r not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical sen ses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity o f the senses - all these come into being only through the existence o f their objects, through humanised nature. T h e cultivation o f the five sen ses is the work o f all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner o f crude practical need has only a restricted sense. F o r a man who is starving the human form o f food does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how this way o f eating differs from that o f animals . . . the society that is fully developed produces man in all the richness o f his being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the senses, as its constant reality.12 I f bourgeois aesthetic thought suspends, for a rare moment, the distinction between subject and object, M arx preserves this distinction in the act o f transgressing it. Unlike bourgeois idealism, he insists on the objective material preconditions o f sensory emancipation; but the

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sen ses are already objective and subjective together, m odes o f material practice as well as experiential wealth. What he calls the ‘history o f industry’ can be submitted to a double reading: what from the historian’s viewpoint is an accumulation o f productive forces is, phenomenologically speaking, the materialized text o f the human body, the ‘open book o f the essential powers o f man*. Sen suou s capacities and social institutions are the recto and verso o f one another, divergent perspectives on the same phenomenon. And just as the discourse o f aesthetics evolved, with Baum garten, as an attempt to m ap those sensible features which an objectivist rationality was in danger o f suppressing, so M arx warns that ‘ a psychology for which this book [o f the senses], the m ost tangible and accessible part o f history, is closed, can never becom e a real science with a genuine content.” 3 W hat is needed is a form o f knowledge which can examine the material preconditions o f different sensory relations to the world: ‘the sen se perception o f a fetish-worshipper is different from that o f a G reek because his sensuous existence is different.*14 M arx ’s Paris M anuscripts thus su rp ass at a stroke the duality between the practical and the aesthetic which lies at the heart o f philosophical idealism. By redefining the reified, commodified sense organs o f that tradition as historical products and forms o f social practice, M arx relocates bodily subjectivity as a dimension o f an evolving industrial history. But this judicious curbing o f idealist subjectivity is, ironically, all in the name o f the subject: the only point o f recalling that subject’s objective character is so as the better to com prehend the political preconditions within which subjective pow ers may be exercised as sheer ends in themselves. In one sense, the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘practical’ are indissolubly at one; in another sen se, the latter exists for the sake o f the former. A s M argaret Rose has pointed out, M arx inverts Schiller by grasping human freedom as a question o f the realization o f the senses rather than as a liberation from them ;15 but he inherits the Schillerian aesthetic ideal o f an all­ round, m any-sided human development, and like the idealist aestheticians holds strongly that human societies are, or should be, en d s in themselves. Social intercourse requires no metaphysical or utilitarian grounding, but is a natural expression o f human ‘species being*. Ju s t as Schiller, towards the conclusion o f his Letters on the Aesthetic Education o f M an , speaks o f how human society is b o m for pragm atic ends but evolves beyond such utility to becom e a delightful

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end in itself, so M arx finds the lineaments o f such ‘aesthetic* bonding at the heart o f the politically instrumental: When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. B u t at the sam e time they acquire a new need - a need for society - and what appears as a m eans has becom e an end. T h is practical development can be m ost strikingly observed in the gatherings o f French socialist workers. Sm oking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer m eans o f creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. T h e brotherhood o f man is not a hollow ph rase, it is a reality, and the nobility o f m an shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.16 I f production is an end in itself for capitalism , so is it also, in a quite different sense, for M arx. T h e actualization o f human powers is a pleasurable necessity o f human nature, needing no more functional justification than the work o f art. Indeed art figures for M arx as the ideal paradigm o f material production precisely because it is so evidendy autotelic. ‘A writer’, he com m ents, ‘does not regard his w orks as m eans to an end. T h ey are an end in themselves; so little are they “ m eans” , for him self and others, that he will, if necessary, sacrifice his own existence to their existence.’ 17 T h e Grundrisse speaks o f medieval handicraft as ‘still h alf artistic; it has its aim in itse lf’;18 and in the EPM M arx characterizes ‘true’ human production as the im pulse to create in freedom from im m ediate need. T h e gratuitous­ n ess o f art, its transcendence o f sordid utility, contrasts with enforced labour as human desire differs from biological instinct. Art is a form o f creative surplus, a radical exceeding o f necessity; in Lacanian terminology, it is what rem ains when need is subtracted from dem and. It is in the concept o f use-value, above all, that M arx deconstructs the opposition between the practical and the aesthetic. W hen he w rites o f the em ancipated sen ses as ‘theoreticians in their im m ediate praxis’, he m eans that theoria, the pleasurable contemplation o f an object’s m aterial qualities, is an active process within our functional relations with it. W e experience the sen suou s wealth o f things by

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drawing them within our signifying projects - a stance which differs on the one hand from the crude instrum entalism o f exchange-value, an d on the other hand from som e disinterested aesthetic speculation. T h e ‘practical* for M arx already includes this ‘aesthetic’ responsiveness to particularity; its twin enem ies are the commodifying abstraction o f both object and drive, and the aestheticist fantasies o f the social parasite, who severs the bond between use and pleasure, necessity and desire, and so allows the latter to consum e themselves in privileged disconnection from material detcrminacy. In so far as this idealism converts pleasure and desire them selves to comm odities, these twin enem ies are secretly one; what the idle rich consum e is the narcissism o f their own acts o f pleasurable consumption. F o r M arx him self, it is not the use o f an object which violates its aesthetic being, b u t that abstraction o f it to an empty receptacle which follows from the sway o f exchange-value and the dehumanization o f need. Classical aesthetics and commodity fetishism both purge the specificity o f things, stripping their sensuous content to a pure ideality o f form. It is in this sen se that M arx’s profoundly anti-Kantian aesthetic is also an anti-aesthetic, the ruin o f all disinterested contemplation. T h e utility o f objects is the ground, not the antithesis, o f our appreciation o f them , just as our delight in social intercourse is inseparable from its necessity. I f the early Mane is anti-Kantian in this sense, he is Kantian enough in another. ‘ It is only when objective reality universally becom es for m an the reality o f m an’s essential pow ers’, M arx writes in the EPM y ‘and thus the reality o f his own essential powers, that all objects becom e for him the objectification o f himself objects that confirm an d realise his individuality, his objects, i.e. he himself becom es the object.’19 N othing could be further from K an t than the politics o f this assertion; but it is difficult to see how it differs epistemologically from the specular, imaginary relation between subject and object delineated in the third Critique. T h e Paris M anuscripts would seem to envisage a fundam ental deconstruction o f the antinomy between N ature and humanity, as the former is steadily hum anized, and the latter gradually naturalized, through em ancipated labour. T h is equitable interchange, whereby subject and object p a ss ceaselessly into each other, is for M arx an historical hope and for K an t a regulative hypothesis; but there is no insuperable distance between M arx’s subject-confirm ing object, and K an t’s wistful glimpse in the aesthetic

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representation o f a purposiveness enheartening to humankind. It will be left to a later M arxist materialism to rupture this imaginary enclosure by insisting on the heterogeneity o f matter to consciousness, on the material as som e irreducible externality which inflicts a necessary' wound on our narcissism. T h e theme o f the specular identity o f subject and object, meanwhile, will pass not into the later M arx and Engels but into G eorg L u kacs and som e currents o f W estern M arxism . I f the young M arx thus stands in ambivalent relationship to Kant, he is similarly double-edged in his attitude to Schiller. M arx, as we have noted, inherits Schiller's ‘disinterested' concern with the all­ round realization o f human powers as an end in itself;20 but the process by which this might historically com e about is as far from classical disinterestedness as one could imagine. T h e scandalous originality o f M arx is to harness this noble Schillerian vision o f a symmetrical, many-sided humanity to highly partial, particular, one­ sided political forces. T h e m eans and the ends o f communism are interestingly at odds: a traditionally conceived Humanität will be brought to birth by those whose humanity is most crippled and depleted; an aesthetic society will be the fruit o f the most resolutely instrumental political action; an ultimate plurality o f powers flows only from the most resolute partisanship. It is as though M arx cross­ breeds W eimar humanism with the implacable engagement o f a Kierkegaard: the disinterested emancipation o f human faculties will be accomplished not by by-passing specific social interests, but by going all the way through them and com ing out on the other side. Only such a move can resolve the Schillerian riddle o f how an ideal culture by definition inimical to particular interests may enter upon m aterial existence without fatally compromising itself. T h e discourse o f aesthetics addresses a grievous alienation between sense and spirit, desire and reason; and for M arx this alienation is rooted in the nature o f class-society itself. With the increasing instrumentalization o f Nature and humanity under capitalism, the labour process com es under the sway o f an im posed, abstract law, which expels from it all corporeal pleasure. Enjoyment, as M arx argues in The German Ideology, then becom es a minor philosophical cult o f the ruling class. It would appear impossible under these conditions to harmonize ‘spirit* and ‘sense* —to reconcile the coercive rational form s o f social life with its grossly particular contents. In such

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a social o rd e r, a d e sirab le ‘aesth etic’ identity o f fo rm and content w ould se e m un attain able. T h is dichotom y then cleav es its path through the h u m an body: while the bod y’ s produ ctive pow ers are rationalized a n d co m m o d ified , its sym bolic, libidinal drives are either ab stracted to c r u d e appetite o r siph on ed o f f a s red u n d an t. W ithdrawn from the p r o c e s s o f lab ou r, they are ch an n elled in stead into three isolated e n c la v e s o f progressively m arginal sign ifican ce: art, religion an d sexuality. A ‘tru e’ aesth etic practice - a relation to N atu re and society w hich w o u ld b e at once se n su o u s and rational - b ifu rc ates into a bru tal asc e ticism on the on e han d, and a b a ro q u e aesth eticism on the oth er. E x p u n g e d from m aterial produ ction , h um an creativity eith er d issip a te s into idealist fantasy or run s riot in that cynical travesty o f it s e lf known a s p o ssessiv e appetite. C a p ita list society is at on ce an orgy o f su ch an arch ic d esire and the reign o f a suprem ely b o d iless re aso n . A s with som e strikingly ill-achieved artefact, its se n su o u s co n te n ts d egen erate to sh e e r raw im m ediacy, while its govern in g fo rm s grow rigidly ab stract an d auton om ou s. A esth etics is, am o n g oth er things, an attem pt to rejoin these su n d ere d so cial sp h e res, d iscern in g in them à la B au m g arten som e h om ologou s lo g ic. A perilously form alistic reason m ust rein corporate that w hich th e cap italist system exp els a s so m uch w aste m aterial. I f reaso n an d p le a su re are at lo g ge rh ead s, then the artefact m ay p roffer m o d els o f recon ciliation , sen su alizin g the form er and ration alizin g the latter in the m an n e r o f S c h ille r’s play drive. It can o ffer, m oreover, an illum in atin g solu tion to the p roblem o f freed o m an d necessity - for freed o m in th e se social con dition s h as lap sed into anarchy, and n ecessity in to iron d eterm in ism . W e shall se e later in the case o f N ietzsche how artistic creation prom ises to deconstruct this opposition how m arvellously u n d ccid ab le it is w hether the artist in the act o f p rodu ction is su p rem ely free, or governed by som e in exorable logic. A esth etics se e k s to resolve in an im aginary way the p ro b lem o f why, u n d er certain h istorical con d ition s, hum an bodily activity gen erates a set o f ‘ratio n al’ fo rm s by w hich the body itse lf is th en con fiscated. M arx h im se lf will rejoin the se n su o u s an d the rational in the con cept o f u se -v alu e; b u t there can be no liberation o f u se-v alu e as lon g a s the com m odity re ig n s su p rem e , which is why ‘the reso lu tio n o f the theoretical an tith e ses th em selves is p ossib le only in a practical w ay.’21 I f the aesth etic is to realize itse lf it m ust p a ss over into the political, w hich is w h ar it secretly alw ays w as. I f the rift betw een raw appetite

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and disem bodied reason is to be healed, it can only be through a revolutionary anthropology which tracks the roots o f human rationality to their hidden source in the needs and capacities o f the productive body. F o r in the realization o f such needs and capacities, that body ceases to be identical with itself and opens out onto a shared social world, within which its own needs and desires will have to be weighed alongside those o f others. It is in this way that we are led by a direct route from the creative body to such apparently abstract matters as reason, justice and morality - issues which, in bourgeois society, have succeeded in muting the inconvenient clam our o f the body and its concrete interests. M any o f M arx’s m ost vital economic categories are implicitly aesthetic; indeed M ikhail Lifshitz reminds u s that M arx embarked on a detailed study o f the G erm an aesthetician Friedrich Vischer on the very threshold o f his m ajor economic work.22 I f there is one privileged place in his writing where the problem o f abstract and concrete is focused with peculiar sharpness, it is surely in that celebrated metaphysical conundrum, the commodity. T h e commodity, one might claim , is a kind o f grisly caricature o f the authentic artefact, at once reified to a grossly particular object and virulently anti-material in form , densely corporeal and elusively spectral at the sam e time. As W. J . T . M itchell has suggested, ‘the term s that M arx uses to characterise the commodity* are drawn from the lexicon o f Romantic aesthetics and herm eneutics.’23 T h e commodity for M arx is the site o f som e curious disturbance o f the relations between spirit and sense, form and content, universal and particular: it is at once an object and not an object, ‘perceptible and imperceptible by the sen ses’ as he com m ents in Capital, a false concretizing but also a false abstracting o f social relations. In a mystifying ‘ nowr you see it, now you don’t’ logic, the commodity is present and absent simultaneously, a tangible entity whose meaning is wholly immaterial and always elsewhere, in its formal relations o f exchange with other objects. Its value is eccentric to itself, its soul or essence displaced to another commodity w hose essence is similarly elsewhere, in an endless deferral o f identity. In a profound act o f narcissism , the commodity ‘looks on every other commodity as but the form o f appearance o f its own value’,24 and is prom iscuously eager to exchange both body and soul with them. It is blankly disconnected from its own body, since ‘the existence o f things qua commodities, and the value-relation between

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the products o f labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom.*25 T h e commodity is a schizoid, self-contradictory phenomenon, a m ere symbol o f itself, an entity whose meaning and being are entirely at odds and whose sensuous body exists only as the contingent bearer o f an extrinsic form. Money, the universal commodity, as M arx writes in the Grundrisse, ‘implies the separation between the value o f things and their substance*.26 A s the antithesis o f the aesthetic object, a kind o f artefact gone awry, the commodity’s material being is a m ere random instantiation o f the abstract law' o f exchange. Yet if this is a case o f H egel’s ‘bad* universality, the commodity as fetish also exemplifies a ‘bad’ immediacy, negating the general social relations within which it was produced. A s pure exchange-value, the commodity erases from itself every particle o f matter, as alluring auratic object, it parades its own unique sensual being in a kind o f spurious show o f materiality. But this materiality is itself a form o f abstraction, serving as it does to occlude the concrete social relations o f its own production. O n the one hand, the commodity spirits away the substance o f those relations; on the other hand it invests its own abstractions with specious material density. In its esotericism , as well as in its rabid hostility to matter, the commodity is a parody o f metaphysical idealism ; but it is also, as fetish, the very type o f degraded materiality. It thus form s a compact space in which the pervasive contradictions o f bourgeois society bizarrely converge. Ju s t as much o f M arx’s economic thought turns on the aesthetic categories o f form and content, so also does a central part o f his political writing. When M arx accuses H egel o f ‘political formalism’ in his Critique o f Hegel's Doctrine o f the State , he suggests that H egel’s political thought is faithful to the real conditions o f bourgeois society, in which the purely abstract equality o f individuals within the political state sublim es and suppresses their concrete differences and in­ equalities in civil society. In such conditions, M arx argues in the EPM , ‘real human beings, real society* appear simply as ‘formless, inorganic matter’.27 Once again, reified formalism and raw materialism em erge as inverted m irror-images o f each other. Bourgeois society drives a fatal wedge between the subject o f civil society in his or her ‘sen suou s, individual and immediate existence*, and the ‘abstract, artificial m an, man as an allegorical, moral person* o f the political

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state.28 It is in this sense that ‘the perfection o f the idealism o f the state [is] at the sam e time the perfection o f the materialism o f civil society.*29 Political emancipation will be possible only when this dislocation between abstract and concrete, form and content, has been surm ounted - when ‘real, individual man resum es the abstract citizen into him self and as an individual man has becom e a speciesbeing in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relation sh ips.. A 30 Only in democracy, M arx argues in the Critique o f Hegel's Doctrine o f the State , is ‘the form al principle . . . identical with the substantive principle’,31 concrete particularity at one with one’s public political role. Dem ocratic society is the ideal artefact, since its form is the form o f its content: ‘in a democracy, the constitution, the law, i.e. the political state, is itself only a self-determination o f the people and a determinate content o f the people.’32 N on-dem ocratic societies are inept works o f art, in which form remains extrinsic to substance: the law in such political conditions fails to inform the material o f social life from within, and so ‘is dominant, but without really dominating, i.e. without materially penetrating the content o f all the non-political spheres’.33 In the dem ocratic state, by contrast, this abstract juridical structure will be absorbed into civil society itself, to becom e its living organic form. Individuals will form the substance o f the state in their unique particularity, rather than as faceless public cyphers. M arx’s contrast between non-dem ocratic and democratic societies thus reproduces the Kantian distinction between a pure or practical reason which is heteronom ous to the specific, and that m ysterious aesthetic ‘law’ which is at one with the material content it organizes. T h e emancipated society, for M arx as much as for the R ousseau from whom he has learnt here, is an aesthetic interfusion o f form and content. An interfusion o f form and content, in fact, may be taken as M arx’s aesthetic ideal. H e spoke o f striving to achieve such a unity in his own scrupulously crafted literary style, and detested what he saw as Rom anticism ’s disproportioning o f the two, embellishing prosaic contents with exotic ornamentation. It is this discrepancy, as we shall see, which becom es the basis o f his critique o f the bourgeois revolutions in The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte. In an article o f 1842 on the G erm an property laws, M arx declares that ‘form is o f no value unless it is the form o f its content’.34

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T h e key to this fine balance o f form and content is for M arx the concept o f Mass, meaning measure, standard, proportion, moderation, or even at times the compact inner structure o f an artefact. T o preserve due proportion, ‘to apply to each object its inherent standard*,35 would seem M arx’s aim, one which offers a convenient standpoint from which to criticize capitalism . As early as his doctoral dissertation on ancient G reece, M arx was contrasting what he called the ‘dialectics o f m easure’ with the reign o f ‘m easurelessness*; and it is typical o f his thought in general to discern in ancient society a kind o f symmetry and proportion consequent upon its very backwardness. It is this belief which motivates his notorious remarks in the Introduction to the Grundrisse about the unrecapturable perfection o f G reek art, rooted as it is in material immaturity.34 Capitalism too is a m atter o f curbing and constraint, as the straitjacket o f exchangevalue im pedes the free production o f use-value; but unlike ancient society these limits lend it no internal symmetry. On the contrary, capitalism is immoderate, intemperate, one-sided, disproportionate, and thus offends M arx’s aesthetic as well a s his moral sense. Indeed the two faculties are deeply interrelated. T h e capitalist mode o f production certainly deploys a m easure: that o f labour time. B ut one o f the system ’s ironies is that, as it advances into the machinery stage, it begins progressively to undercut its own yardstick. ‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction*, M arx writes in the Grundrisse, ‘in that it p resses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour tim e, on the other side, as the sole m easure and source o f wealth,’ 17 O nce the m ass o f workers have appropriated their own surplus labour, a new m easure will be installed: that o f the ‘needs o f the social individual*, which will now come to determine the amount o f time spent in labouring. I f this is a m easure, it is a remarkably flexible one, since such needs are o f course for M arx socially and historically variable. In the Critique o f the Gotha Programme he is severe with the notion o f applying an equal standard to inevitably unequal individuals, and rebukes this ‘socialist* device as a hangover from bourgeois legality. If human needs are historically mutable and open-ended, then so must be M arx’s m easure; there is a certain m easurelessness about this m easure which distinguishes it from any fixed universal standard, even if M arx has little time on the other hand for the fantasy o f infinitely unlimited needs. T rue wealth, he claim s in the Grundrisse, is

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‘the absolute working-out o f [human] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historical development, which m akes this totality o f development, i.e. the development o f all human pow ers as such the end in itself, not as m easured on a predetermined yardstick’.38 It would seem , then, that the working out o f creative human capacities is somehow its own m easure, transgressing any fixed or given form. I f humanity’ is to be considered, as M arx goes on to insist, in its ‘absolute movement o f becoming*, then it is hard to see how this ceaseless mutability, in which the only norm would seem change itself, does not throw into question the more static, classical paradigm o f an equilibrium o f form and content. T h ere can certainly be no question o f a ‘predetermined yardstick*, o f forms and standards extrinsic to the ‘content* o f history itself. Su ch content must find its own form, act as its own m easure; and it is difficult to see whether this signifies the triumph o f an ‘organic* conception o f form, or the dissolution o f form altogether. What will inform this constantly shifting process o f freely evolved powers? O ne might claim, then, that there are two kinds o f ‘aesthetic’ at work in M arx’s texts, which are not wholly compatible with one another. I f one can be called the beautiful, the other might be properly named the sublime. T h ere is, to b e sure, a ‘bad’ sublime for M arx, along the lines o f H egel’s ‘bad* infinity: it resides in the restless, overweening movement o f capitalism itself, its relentless dissolution o f forms and commingling o f identities, its confounding o f all specific qualities into one indeterminate, purely quantitative process. T h e movement o f the commodity is in this sense a form o f ‘bad* sublimity, an unstoppable metonymic chain in which one object refers itself to another and that to another, to infinity. Like K an t’s mathematical sublim e, this endless accumulation o f pure quantity' subverts all stable representation, and money is its m ajor signifier. ‘T h e quantity o f money’, M arx writes in the EPM , ‘becom es more and m ore its sole important property. Ju st as it reduces everything to its own form o f abstraction, so it reduces itself in the course o f its own movement to something quantitative. Measurelessness and immeasurability becom e its true standard.’39 Once again - but now in a negative sense - M arx’s m easure is itself immeasurable. M oney for M arx is a kind o f monstrous sublimity, an infinitely spawning signifier which has severed all relation with the real, a fantastical idealism which blots out specific value as surely as those more conventional figures o f 212

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sublim ity - the raging ocean, the m ountain crags - en gu lf all particular identities in their unbounded expanse. T h e sublim e, for M arx as for K a n t, is D as Unform: the form less or m onstrous. T h is ‘b a d ’ sublim e, however, can be counterpointed by a ‘go o d ’ one, which em e rg e s m ost evidently in the Eighteenth Brumaire.w T h e open ing p a g e s o f that text, surely M arx’s m ajor semiotic work, depict the great b o u rg e o is revolutions as living just that hiatus betw een form and content, sign ifier and signified, which the classical aesthctician in M arx finds m o st in supportable. In a kind o f historical cro ss-d ressin g , each b o u rg e o is revolution tricks itself out in the flashy insignia o f previous ep och s, in o rd er to conceal beneath these inflated form s the sh am eful paucity o f its true social content. In the very act o f fash ion ing a future, such insurrections find th em selves com pulsively repeatin g the p ast; history is the nightm are from w hich they seek to aw aken, but which in doin g so they m erely dream again. E ach revolution is a farcical travesty o f the last, appropriatin g its external sym bology in an intertextual chain.41 B ou rgeois revolutions are inherently th eatrical, a m atter o f panache and breath less rhetoric, a baroque frenzy w hose poetic effusion s are in inverse proportion to their m eagre sub stan ce. T h e re is a kind o f fictiveness in their very structure, a h id den flaw which disarticulates form and content. T h e se revolutionary repetitions, how ever, are not merely parodie, caricatu res o f what w as no doubt already a caricature. O n the contrary, the point o f evoking the past is to sum m on the dead to the aid o f the p resen t, draw ing from them som ething o f their dangerous pow er: T h u s the aw akening o f the d e ad in th ese revolutions served the p u rp o se o f glorifying the new stru g g le s, not o f p aro d y in g the o ld ; o f m agnifying the given task in im agin atio n , not o f fleein g from its solution in reality; o f finding o n c e m ore the spirit o f revolution, not o f m ak in g its gh o st w alk abo u t again .42

O nly by d ream in g the past can revolutionaries aw aken from its nightm are, sin ce the p ast is what they are m ade of. O n ly by turning back, with the horror-stricken face o f W alter B en jam in ’s angelus novus, can the revolution be blown by the w inds o f history into the realm o f the future. T h e p ast, for the bourgeois revolutionaries a s for 213

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B en jam in , m u st be p re sse d forcibly into the service o f the present, classical tradition s heretically appropriated and m isw ritten in order to redeem th e tim e. T h e revolutionary is the o ffsp rin g not only o f oppressive political p aren ts, but o f ancestral broth ers and sisters who u su rp ed the patriarch in their own tim e and have bequeathed som eth in g o f that perilous pow er to later gen eration s. T h e re is a siblin g solidarity w hich cuts athwart the em pty, h om ogen eous continuum o f ru lin g-class history, and which B en jam in term s ‘tradition’. R ecyclin g the past, then, is both opiate an d inspiration - a cynical thieving o f its ‘au ra’ which n onetheless, as B en jam in m ight have put it, su sp e n d s the sm ooth flow o f historical tim e in a shocking ‘con stellation ’, allow ing a su dd en esoteric co rrespo n d en ce to flash between the political n eeds o f the presen t and a red eem ed moment o f the p ast.43 T h e Eighteenth Brumaire goes on to con trast the sem iology o f bourgeois in surrection with the socialist revolution o f the future: T h e so cial revolution o f the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itse lf before it h as strip p ed o ff all superstition in regard to the past. E arlier revolutions req u ired recollections o f p ast w orld history in o rd er to dru g th em selves con cern in g their own content. In ord er to arrive at its own content, the revolution o f the nineteenth century' m u st let the d ead bury their dead. T h e r e the p h rase w ent beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the p h rase.44 W hat is in q u estion here is the whole concept o f a represen tation al aesthetics. P revious revolutions have been form alistic, en grafting a factitious ‘p h ra se ’ or form onto their content; but the co n seq u en ce o f this is a dw arfin g o f the signified by the signifier. T h e content o f socialist revolution, by contrast, is excessive o f all form , out in advance o f its own rhetoric. It is un represen table by anything but itself, sign ified only in its ‘absolute m ovem ent^of b ecom in g’, an d thus a kind o f sublim ity. T h e representational devices o f b o u rg eo is society are those o f exch ange-value; but it is precisely this sign ifyin g fram e that the productive forces m ust break beyond, releasing a heterogeneity o f u se-v alu es w hose unique particularity w ould se e m to refu se all 214

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stan dardized represen tation . It is less a m atter o f discovering the expressive fo rm s ‘adequ ate to’ the substan ce o f socialism , than o f rethinking that w hole opposition - o f graspin g form no longer a s the sym bolic m ould into w hich that sub stan ce is poured, bu t as the ‘form o f the co n ten t’, a s the structure o f a ce ase le ss self-produ ction . T o conceive o f form in this way is not wholly incom patible with M arx ’s classical aesthetic; indeed it can be seen from on e viewpoint a s ju st such a unity o f form and content. T h e content o f com m unist society, like th e R om antic artefact, m ust generate its own form from within, find its own level and m easure. But what kind o f form will this be, if co m m u n ism is the all-round liberation o f a m ultiplicity o f particular use-values, where the only absolute would seem development itself? S o cialism is able to prescribe the institutional form s which w ould be n ecessary if this wealth o f use-values, this self-deligh ting plurality o f hum an pow ers, were to be unlocked from the metaphysical p rison -h ou se o f exch ange-value; yet such unlocking releases the non ­ identical from the identical, and the question is one o f how this non­ identity is to represen t itself. ‘ R econciliation’, w rites T h eo d o r A dorno, ‘w ould release the non-identical, w ould rid it o f coercion, including spiritualised coercion ; it w ould open the road to the m ultiplicity o f differen t things and strip dialectics o f its pow er over th em .’45 C ertain ly the content o f such a society cannot be ‘ read o f f ’ from the institutions se t in place to produce it. ‘W e have to ensure the m ean s o f life, and the m ean s o f com m unity’, w rites Raym ond W illiam s in Culture and Society 1780-1950. ‘ B ut what will then, by these m ean s, be lived, we cannot know or say.’4* M arxism is not a theory o f the fu tu re, but a theory and practice o f how to m ake a future p ossible. A s a doctrine, it belon gs entirely to what M a rx calls ‘p re ­ history’ ; its ro le is sim ply to resolve those contradiction s which currently preven t u s from m oving beyond that ep och to history proper. A bout that history p roper, M arxism has little to say, and M arx h im self generally m aintained a sym ptom atic silence on this score. T h e only truly historic event w ould be to get history started, by clearin g away the ob stacles in its path. S o far, n oth ing particularly special h as o ccu rred : history to date has sim ply been the sam e old story, a set o f variations on p ersistin g structu res o f op p ression and exploitation. T h e endless recycling and recirculating o f the commodity is the m ost recen t ph ase o f that historical deadlock, the perpetual p resen t by w hich class-society implicitly den ies that it w as ever born, 215

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since to confess that one was bom is to acknowledge that one can die. B ut this circuit cannot be broken by representing a future, since the m eans o f representation belong to a superseded present, and are pow erless to take the m easure o f that which will have transgressed them. It is in this sense, precisely, that the ‘content goes beyond the phrase*. Ju st as the pious Jew s, so Walter Benjam in reminds us,47 were forbidden on pain o f idolatry to fashion graven im ages o f the G od o f the future, so political radicals are prohibited under pain o f fetishism from blueprinting their ultimate desire. T h is is not to denigrate the pow er o f utopian thought, but to recall its fictive or regulative status, the limits o f its representational resources. M arx began his political career in contention with what one might call the subjunctive mood o f socialism , with the ‘wouldn’t it be nice if * kind o f radical idealist; and his brusque imperative to ‘let the dead bury their dead* is a rem inder that all utopia springs from the past rather than the future. T h e true soothsayers or clairvoyants are the technical experts hired by monopoly capitalism to peer into the entrails o f the system and assure its rulers that their profits are safe for another twenty years. As W alter Benjam in knew, it is not dream s o f liberated grandchildren which sp u r men and women to revolt, but mem ories o f enslaved ancestors. L ik e any emancipatory theory, M arxism is concerned with putting itself progressively out o f business. It exists to bring about the material conditions which will spell its own demise, and like M oses will not pass with its people into the prom ised land. All emancipatory theories carry som e self-destruct device within them, eagerly anticipating the moment when they can wither away. I f there are still political radicals in a century’s time, it will be a grim prospect. T h ere is no way, then, in which the diverse uses to which men and women will turn their emancipated powers in a socialist future can now be im aged; such a process defies representation, and is in that sense sublim e. T h e more recalcitrant problem, a s we have seen, is to know how that process could be represented even when it is under way, given that it is o f the essence o f sensuous particularity to give the slip to general representational forms. T h ere is another sense in which M arx’s classical concern to reconcile form and content is significandy qualified in his work. T o distinguish between the matter (productive forces) and form (social relations) o f a particular society, as G .A . Cohen has argued, 216

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‘d iscred its cap ital’s pretension to bein g an irreplaceable m ean s o f creatin g m aterial w ealth . . . C on fu sio n o f content and form creates the reactionary illusion that physical production and m aterial growth can be ach ieved only by capitalist investm ent.’** It is the bourgeois political eco n o m ists w ho are in this sen se the ‘classicists’ , w edded to a conflation o f cap italist form and productive m aterial. C om m u n ism , C oh en co m m en ts, m ay be described as the ‘ co n q u est o f form by m atter. F o r in n egatin g cxchange-value com m unism releases the content fetish ised econom y im prisoned in form .’49 Is this then to claim that co m m u n ism is form less? C o h en ’s resp o n se to this query is to argue that h u m an activity un der com m unism is not unstructured, but that it is a lso not p re-stru ctu red. N o social form is imposed upon it, but it d o e s have a form . ‘O n e m ight say: the form is now ju st the boundary created by matter itself.'*" H ere, on cc again, M a rx equivocates betw een the classical and the sublim e. T h e form o f com m un ism is entirely at one with its content, and to this extent one can speak o f a classical sym m etry or identity between the two. Certainly com m unism , unlike the conventional sublim e, is not sh apeless and am orp h ous. B ut this identity o f form and content is so absolute that the form er effectively d isa p p e a rs into the latter; and since the latter is no m ore than a continually self-expan d in g m ultiplicity boun ded only by itself, the effect is then one o f a certain sublim ity. T h e re is an other way o f putting this point. C oh en w rites o f the structu re displayed by com m un ism as ‘no m ore than the outline o f the activities o f its m em bers, not som ething into which they m ust fit th em selves’ ;51 an d this is strongly rem iniscent o f the K an tian ‘law’ o f beauty. T h a t ‘ law ’, as we have seen, is wholly im m anent to its content: it is the very form o f that content’s internal organization, rather than so m e external, abstractable regulation. W hat M arx h a s effectively don e, then, is to project this im m anance into K an t’ s alternative aesthetic state , the sublim e. If K an t’s beauty is too static, too harm oniously organ ic for M arx ’s political p u rp o ses, his sub lim e is too form less. T h e condition o f com m unism could be envisaged only by som e blen din g o f the two - by a p ro cess which h as all o f the su b lim e’s potentially infinite expan siveness, but which nevertheless carries its form al law w ithin itself. M a rx ’s acco u n t o f m o d e m history may be fairly straightforw ardly put. T h e capitalist m ode o f production is pow ered by th e narrow est 217

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motives o f profit and self-interest; but the overall product o f such discreditable intentions is the greatest accumulation o f productive forces that history has ever witnessed. T h e bourgeoisie have now brought those forces to the point where the socialist dream o f a social order free o f toil can in principle be realized. For only on the basis o f such a high level o f material development is socialism possible. W ithout such stored productive capacity, the only ‘socialism* would be what M arx scathingly described as ‘generalized scarcity*. It is arguable that men and women could seize control o f the productive forces in a state o f underdevelopment and expand them in a socialist direction. T h e case against this is that moderately hedonistic human beings would not freely subm it themselves to such a back-breaking, dispiriting task, and that if they did not then it would be left to a despotic bureaucratic state to do it for them. Whatever the merits o f these opposing arguments, there can be no doubt that M arx him self envisaged socialism as riding on the backs o f the bourgeoisie. T h is massive unleashing o f productive powers is for M arx, inseparably, the unfolding o f human richness. T h e capitalist division o f labour brings with it a high refinement o f individual capacities, just as the capitalist economy, in uprooting all parochial obstacles to global intercourse, lay's down the conditions for international community. In a similar way, bourgeois political and cultural traditions nurture, however partially and abstractly, the ideals o f freedom , equality and universal justice. Capitalism represents a felicitous Fall, even if one might believe with the Milton o f Paradise Lost that it would have been better had it never occurred at all. T here need certainly be no vulgarly teleological implication that every society must pass through this baptism o f fire if it is to attain socialism ; but M arx's praise for the magnificent revolutionary achievements o f the bourgeoisie is a steady keynote in his work, inimical to all Rom antic-radical nostalgia and moralistic polemic. It is custom ary these days am ong radicals to link the bourgeoisie with patriarchy, as equivalendy oppressive formations; but this com es near to a category error, since there has never been a good word to say for patriarchy, and there is much to be admired in the history o f the middle class. Through capitalism, individuality is enriched and developed, fresh creative powers are bred, and new forms o f social intercourse created. All o f this, o f course, is bought at the m ost terrible cost. ‘M ore than

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any other mode o f production*, M arx writes in Capital, ‘[capitalism] squanders human lives, or living labour, and not only flesh and blood, but also nerve and brain. Indeed it is only through the most enorm ous w aste o f the individual development that the development o f mankind is at all preserved in the epoch o f history immediately preceding the conscious organization o f society.,S2 T h is dynamic, exhilarating release o f potential is also a long unspeakable human tragedy, in which the great majority o f men and women are condemned to a life o f wretched, fruidess toil. T h e division o f labour maims and nourishes simultaneously, generating fresh skills and capacities but in a cripplingly one-sided way. T h e creative powers which enable humanity to control its environment, eradicating disease, famine, natural catastrophe, also enable it to prey upon itself. Each new m edium o f communication is at the sam e time an instrument o f division and alienation. Culture is at once a document o f civilization and a record o f barbarism, the two as closely imbricated as the recto and verso o f a sheet o f paper. Capitalist development brings the individual to new heights o f subtle self-aw areness, to an intricate wealth o f subjectivity, in the very act o f producing him as a predatory' egoist. All o f this, for M arx, is because o f the exploitative social relations under which these otherwise life-bringing productive forces have been evolved. T h ose social relations were nccessary in their day for such evolution, such that no simplistic dichotomy o f ‘forces good, relations bad* is feasible; but they have now come to act as fetters upon free productive development, and must be swept aside by socialist transformation. U nder socialist relations o f production, forces which currently create misery and estrangement will be deployed for the creative self-realization o f all. Capitalism has generated a sum ptuous wealth o f capacities, but under the sign o f scarcity, alienation, one-sidedness; it now rem ains to place as many o f these capacities as possible at the disposal o f each individual, convening within her powers which were historically bred in mutual isolation. T h is whole problematic, o f a dynamic energy blocked and thwarted by ossified institutions, would seem to place M arx squarely in the cam p o f Rom antic humanism, with its expression/repression model o f human existence. T h is is no longer a model which we can look upon uncritically, whatever partial truths it doubtless contains. T o 219 I

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begin with, there is a notable difficulty in M arxist writing over the relation between the productive forces as material techniques, and the human powers and abilities which form a central part o f them. T h e difficulty would seem to arise, in part at least, because the productive forces include such human powers, yet are to be developed for the sake o f them. In one sense, productive forces and human powers would seem indissoluble; in another sense, an essentially instrumental relation holds between them. M arx him self generally brackets the two categories together, as when he writes o f human wealth as ‘the universality o f individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc.’ ;53 elsewhere in the Grundrisse he speaks o f ‘the highest development o f the forces o f production, hence also the richest development o f individuals’.54 G . A. C ohen comments on the ‘extensive coincidence* in M arx’s thought between the expansion o f the productive forces and the growth o f human capacities,55 while Jo n Elster remarks that the Marxist theory' o f history could be summarized as ‘uninterrupted progress o f the productive forces, interrupted progress o f human development and social integration’ .56 What this m eans is that the development o f the productive forces under capitalism , which will then permit socialism to actualize human capacities to their fullest, in fact involves the stunting and curtailing o f certain capacities in the capitalist era. In this sense, the development o f the productive forces and o f human powers arc synonymous in the end; but one condition o f their com ing to b e so is the tragic mutilation o f such powers under the dominance o f capital. F o r such mutilation is inevitable under capitalism; and capitalism is essential to the development o f the productive forces, which is in turn the precondition for a socialist realization o f human capacities. Art, for M arx, is a suprem e instance o f this irony. In his view, art flourished in conditions o f social immaturity such as ancient G reece, when quality and proportion could still be preserved from the sway o f the commodity. Once it enters under that quantifying influence in a m ore developed historical epoch, it begins to degenerate in relation to its earlier perfection. In this field o f achievement human capacities and the forces o f production are not only not synchronous with one another, but are actually in inverse proportion. But this is only p an o f the stoiy. F o r the powers which capitalism breeds, once liberated from the tyranny o f exchange-value, will provide the basis for a future socialist a n even more splendid than its ancient predecessor. Once

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m ore, the exp an sio n o f capacities and o f forces converge in the long run; but a lengthy period o f regression on the part o f the form er is essen tial if th is is to co m e about. T h e relation betw een forces and capacities, then, is not quite as neatly h o m o logo u s as som e M arxist form ulations, in cludin g som e o f M arx’s ow n, w ould su ggest. T h is is also true in an oth er sen se. It is easy to see how the exp ressio n /rep ressio n m odel may work for the forces o f p rodu ction , which have sim ply to burst through the integum ent o f capitalist social relations in ord er to com e into their own. B u t the m odel is less illum inating in the case o f hum an pow ers. S o cialist revolution d o es not sim ply liberate, in expressivist style, w hatever cap acities have been generated by capitalism , since these capacities are by no m ean s indiscrim inately positive. I f the capitalist m ode o f p roduction h as brough t forth hum an subjective w ealth, it has also fostered the habits o f dom ination, aggression an d exploitation, w hich no so cialist w ould sim ply w ant to see ‘ released ’. W e cannot, for exam ple, easily extract the rational kernel o f the control o f N ature from the shell o f the op pression o f hum an beings. M arx is at his m ost Rom antic-hum anist in his apparent assum ption that hum an capacities becom e m orbid only by virtue o f their alienation, repression , dissociation o r o n e-sid cd n ess. B ut this is surely a d an g ero u s illusion; we m u st co u n t am on g ou r capacities the pow er to torture and wage w ar. T h e very term s ‘ pow er’ and ‘capacity’ have a deceptively positive ring to them , a s o f co u rse d oes the term ‘ creative’. B ut w ar is a form o f creation, an d the bu ildin g o f concentration cam ps is a realization o f hum an pow ers. T h e se uncom fortable corollaries o f M a rx ’s doctrine can be e scap e d only by defining ‘cap acities’ in so broad and nebulous a sen se that the term b ecom es effectively vacuous. It is p o ssib le to lodge another kind o f objection to M a rx ’s doctrine, w hich is that the ideal o f the free realization o f hum an pow ers and capacities is both m asculinist and ethnocentric. It is not h ard to detect within this stren uously self-pro du cin g subject the sh adow o f the virile W estern m ale. S u c h an ethical outlook w ould seem to leave little sp ace for the values o f stilln ess and receptivity, o f b ein g creatively acted upon, o f w ise p assiv en ess and all o f the m ore positive asp ects o f the condition w hich H e id e g ge r will later term Gelassenheit. T h e re is probably in th is sen se a certain sexism structural to M arx ist thought, a s there is a lso p erh ap s in its privileging o f that traditional m ale p reserve, the sp h ere o f production. I f this is a reaso n to reject 221

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M arxism , then it is equally a reason to reject almost every cultural product from the Stone Age to Star W ars. It is, nevertheless, cause for a certain critical resistance to the otherwise attractive vision o f an all-round human self-actualization. I f human powers are far from spontaneously positive, then their emancipation would seem to require careful discrimination. Ju st the sam e, however, might be argued o f the productive forces in general, where the expression/blockage paradigm might once more prove too simplistic. A nuclear power station is a productive force; yet many radicals would argue against its development. There is a question, in other words, o f whether the expansion o f the productive forces must not itself be carried on within the framework o f socialist values, and in ways compatible with socialist relations o f production. Jo n Elster notes this potential conflict in a somewhat cursory footnote, when he com m ents that ‘a technique that is optimal in terms o f efficiency may not be so in terms o f welfare.’” Certain forms o f work might be simply incompatible with the socialist values o f self-autonomy, cooperation and creative self-realization; indeed M arx him self seem s to hold that some residual drudgery will always characterize the labour process, and that the expansion o f the productive forces is necessary to release men and women as far as possible from such unwelcome labour. Andrew Levine and Eric Olin Wright have made the telling point that certain technological advances may have the effect o f weakening working-class organization and strengthening the political and ideological power o f the bourgeoisie.58 T h e evolution o f the productive forces, in other words, may involve an actual regression o f those political capacities which need to be nourished if such forces are to be appropriate for socialism. T h ere are, then, two distinct cases. One sees the expansion o f the productive forces as a value in itself, and views socialism simply as the appropriation and further development o f them for the general good. T h e other case is summarized by M arx’s comm ent that the forces o f production m ust be developed ‘under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, human nature’.59 T h e whole concept o f a productive force hovers indeterminately between fact and value, rather, as we shall see, like the Nietzschean notion o f the will to power. I f human capacities are regarded as inherently positive, and viewed as part o f the productive forces, then it might seem to follow that the expansion o f those forces is a good in itself. If, however, the development o f the 222

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fo rces o f p roduction is seen as instrumental to the realization o f hum an cap acities, then the question o f which form o f m aterial developm ent is likely b est to accom plish this goal inevitably p oses itself. T h e re rem ain s, how ever, the need to discrim inate am o n g hum an capacities th em selves, on ce it is granted that som e may b e destructive. W hence are w e to derive the criteria to form such judgem ents? R om antic expressivism is quite unable to answ er th is question : if pow ers exist, then the only im perative is that they should he actualized. V alue, so to speak, is inserted within fact: the very fact that we p o sse ss certain pow ers w ould seem to brin g alo n g with it the norm ative ju d gem en t that we should freely realize them . O ne can ‘resolve’ the fact/valu e dilem m a by the sim ple device o f p rojectin g the latter into the form er. T h e p ro cess o f hum an capacities will not itself inform u s o f w hich are to be actualized and which not, w ill supply us with no bu ilt-in criteria o f selection; and it m ight then b e thought that such criteria have to be im ported from som e transcendental space. M arx is obviously hostile to such an idea, since part o f h is theoretical project is to ab o lish the whole notion o f m oral d isco u rse as an area sep arable from history. W hether M arx actually believed in ‘m oral’ concepts is a controversial issu e within M a rx ism .60 T h e problem is that he w ould ap p ear often enough to d ism iss m orality as ideological, while draw ing implicitly on m oral notions in his critique o f class-society. T h e truth is that M arx d o es not so m u ch reject m orality, as translate it in large m easu re from su p erstru ctu re to b ase. T h e ‘ m oral’ then b ecom es identified with the dynam ic self-realization o f hum an pow ers - projected, a s it w ere, into the productive p ro cess itse lf rather than m arooned a s a set o f superstructural institutions and ideologies. H um an productive powers w ould not se e m to require m oral judgem en ts im ported from elsew here, from a specialized ethical sph ere; they w ould seem instead intrinsically positive, and ‘im m orality’ w ould ap p ear to co n sist in their thw arting, estran gin g and disproportioning. M arx d oes indeed p o sse ss an ‘ ab so lu te’ m oral criterion: the un qu estion able virtue o f a rich, all-rou n d expansion o f capacities for each individual. It is from this stan dpoin t that any social form ation is to be a sse sse d - either in its curren t ability to allow for such self-realization , or in its potential contribution to such a condition in the future. T h is, how ever, leaves a num ber o f question s unansw ered. Why 223

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should ‘all-round’ development be the m ost morally admirable goal?

And what is to count as such? Is it the aim o f historical struggle to balance my capacity to torture in symmetrical, proportionate relation to my capacity to love? M arx’s vision would seem in this sense curiously formalistic. It would appear less a matter o f what powers we express, than o f whether we have recuperated them from their estranged, lop-sided state and actualized them as variously, fully and comprehensively as possible.61 T h ere is, however, a powerful rebuttal o f this whole interpretation o f M arx’s case. T h e riposte to the charge that M arx believed all human powers to be inherently positive is simply that this constitutes a Rom antic misreading o f his texts. M arx does indeed discriminate between different human capacities, on the basis o f a doctrine which he inherited from H egel, and which provides the foundation o f a communist ethics. T h e discriminatory norm in question is that we should foster only those particular powers which allow an individual to realize herself through and in terms o f the similar free selfrealization o f others. It is this, above all, which distinguishes socialism from liberalism. T h is constitutes an important qualification to the Rom antic interpretation o f M arx; but it still leaves some problem s unresolved. For one thing, even if this is indeed the kernel o f M arx’s political creed, it remains true that he very often writes as though human capacities were indeed inherently positive, in oblivion o f his own caveat. For another thing, any such normative concept o f self-realization instantly implicates notions o f justice, equality and associated moral ideas, which means that morality cannot after all belong purely to the productive ‘base’. On the contrary, it is precisely for this reason that societies require ‘superstructural’ institutions o f a juridical and ethical kind, apparatuses which regulate the complex business o f deciding between more and less reasonable, creative human needs and desires. There is evidence to believe that M arx himself, despite his ‘productivist’ morality, acknowledged this fact, and did not simply dism iss the notion o f justice, or the need for such juridical institutions, out o f hand. It could be argued, however, that the ideal o f self-realization through and in terms o f others simply succeeds in pushing the question at issue back a stage. For M arx’s vision o f such reciprocal self-expression is not, for instance, that o f H egel, for whom it was fully compatible with social inequality. What are to count as desirable m odes o f mutual self-realization? B y what 224

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criteria are they to be evaluated? Such criteria must be discursively established; and M arx, as Jürgen H aberm as has argued, remains caught within a philosophy o f the subject which passes over this p rocess o f intersubjective communication.62 It is not for him so much a m atter o f discursively evaluating human capacities, as o f actualizing them - a position which not only takes for granted the positive nature o f human powers, but seem s to assum e that such powers and needs are intuitively present to the subject, spontaneously given by the historical process outside the context o f intersubjective argumentation. B ut if human subjects have needs, then we know already what at least one o f those needs must be, namely the need for the subject to know what its needs actually are. Given the subject’s self-opacity, this is far from self-evident, which is why moral discourse becom es necessary. T h e problem for M arx would seem to be not moral but political: how are powers which we can presume to be potentially beneficent to be historically realized? ‘By reducing the self-positing o f the absolute ego to the more tangible productive activity o f the species’, writes H aberm as, ‘ [Marx] eliminates reflection as such as a motive force o f history, even though he retains the framework o f the philosophy o f reflection.*63 I f M arx inserts value within fact, a num ber o f Second International M arxist theoreticians found themselves caught in an uncomfortable duality between the two. M arxist science could disclose the laws o f history, but was incapable o f assessing whether their supposedly inevitable outcome was actually desirable. A neo-Kantian ethics had therefore to be imported, to supplement an apparently non-normative positivism. But as Leszek Kolakowski has argued, M arxism ‘is not a mere description o f the world but the expression and self-knowledge o f a social process by which the world is revolutionized, and thus the subject o f that self-knowledge, i.e. the proletariat, comprehends reality in the very act o f transforming it*.64 What the fact/value dichotomy fails to account for, in short, is emancipatory knowledge that peculiar kind o f cognition which is essential for human freedom. In the critical consciousness o f any oppressed group or class, the understanding and the transforming o f reality, ‘fact’ and ‘value’, are not separable processes but aspects o f the sam e phenomenon. As Kolakowski puts it: ‘Since subject and object coincide in the knowledge o f society: since, in this case, science is the self-knowledge o f society and, by the sam e token, a factor in determining its situation 225

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at any stage o f history; and since, in the case o f the proletariat, this self-know ledge is at the sam e time a revolutionary movement, it follows that the proletariat cannot at any point disjoin its “ ideal” from the actual process o f realizing it.*65 I f this is the case, then M arxism has its own particular answer to one o f the problem s to which aesthetics offers an imaginary solution. A reified reason which believes itself to view the world nonnormatively will force the issue o f value beyond its frontiers, and the aesthetic is then one place where that issue can take up a home. Morality, o f course, is another: but the Kantian dilemma is one o f how this noumenal sphere intersects with phenomenal history. M arxism , by contrast, locates the unity o f ‘fact* and ‘value’ in the practical, critical activity o f men and women - in a form o f understanding which is brought to birth in the first place by emancipatory interests, which is bred and deepened in active struggle, and which is an indispensable part o f the realization o f value. T h e re are certain kinds o f knowledge which we must at all costs obtain in order to be free; and this casts the fact/value problem in a quite different light. M arx is in entire agreem ent with the Earl o f Shaftesbuiy - an unlikely candidate, otherwise, for his approval - that human powers and human society are an absolute end in themselves. T o live well is to live in the free, m any-sided realization o f one’s capacities, in reciprocal interaction with the similar self-expression o f others. We have seen som e o f the difficulties o f this doctrine; but it remains, for all that, the single m ost creative aspect o f the aesthetic tradition. As an aesthetician, M arx is offended by the instrumentalization o f human powers, inevitable though this process may be in pre-histoiy. H e looks for his desirable moral goal to the ‘absolute working out o f creative potentialities . . . [with] the development o f all human powers as such the end in itse lf’.66 In the realm o f socialism , work will remain a necessity; but beyond that horizon begins ‘that development o f human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm o f freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm o f necessity as its basis. T h e shortening o f the working-day is its basic prerequisite.’67 If art matters» it is as a type o f that which h as its end entirely in itself, and thus is m ost politically charged in its very autonomy. Unlike Nietzsche and H eidegger after him , M arx does not press

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through this aestheticization to hum an cognition itself. T h is is not som e an aem ic rationalism : the goal o f hum an life, fo r M arx as for A ristotle, is n ot truth, but h appin ess or w ell-being. H is work is an extensive en q u iry into w hat m aterial conditions w ould be necessary for this goal to be realized as a general hum an condition , and thus belon gs to the d iscou rse o f classical m orality.“ M arx is a m oralist in the m ost traditional sen se o f the term , w hich is to say that he is concern ed w ith the political determ inations o f the goo d life. H is m orality th us stan d s op p osed to that w ithered m odern sen se o f the ‘m o ral’, im poverished to interpersonal relations and ‘sp iritual’ values alone, for w hich the M arxist term is ‘m oralism ’. It is b e c a u se this lab our o f enquiry is historically n ecessary that thought, for M arx , h as at least for the presen t to rem ain instrum ental. T ru th m ay not be the telos o f history; but it nevertheless plays a vital part in se cu rin g that end. T h a t final aestheticization o f hum an existence which we call com m unism cannot be prem aturely anticipated by a reason w hich surren d ers itse lf wholly to the ludic and poetic, to im age and intuition. In stead, a rigorously analytical rationality is n eed ed , to help unlock the contradictions which prevent u s from attaining the condition in which instrum entalism may lose its unw elcom e dom in an ce. It m ay well be that in som e future social o rd er theory, in strum ental thought, calculative reason will no longer play a central role in hum an life, but will have been tran sform ed out o f recognition . T o prefigure such an order now, by (fo r exam ple) the d econ struction o f theory and poetry, may thus be a valuable proleptic gestu re. B u t i f an aesthetic existence is to be achieved fo r all, thought in general m u st not be prem aturely aestheticized. S u c h a move w ould be intolerably privileged, in societies w here the freedom to play, in thought or anyw here e lse, is the preserve o f the few. T h o se p o st­ structuralist thinkers w ho urge that we abandon truth for dance and lau gh ter m igh t p au se to inform us ju st who this ‘w e’ is su p p osed to signify . T h eo ry , as H egel knew, is only n ecessary in ih e first place b ecau se con tradiction s exist; as a m aterial event, it em e rg e s from a certain historically p ro d u ced tension betw een the actual and the p ossib le. W hen M arx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts d esign ates logic as a ’currency o f the m ind’, he m ean s that theory' is itse lf a kind o f conceptual exch ange-value, m ediating an d abstracting with a certain n ecessary disregard for sen su ou s specificity. H e holds, how ever, that without such conceptual exch ange-value, sen su ou s 227

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specificity will continue to be a minority cult. I f the aesthetic is to flourish, it can only be by virtue o f political transformation; and the political thus stands in a meta-linguistic relation to the aesthetic. If M arxism is a meta-language or meta-narrative, it is not because it lays claim to som e absolute truth, a chimera it has consistendy spum ed; it is rather on account o f its insistence that, for any human narrative whatsoever to get under way, certain other histories must be already in place. O f these histories, M arxism attends to the one which concerns material survival and social reproduction; but one must add to this the narrative o f sexual reproduction, about which M arxism has had for the m ost part lirtle o f interest to say. Without these particular grand stories, even' other récit would grind literally to a halt. It is not, however, that these histories merely provide a space within which other stories may be produced; on the contrary, they are so utterly vital, engage such enormous resources o f human energy, that they leave their grim imprint on all o f our more contingent tales, scarring and disfiguring them from within. Som ething o f the ambivalence which characterizes M arxism ’s attitude to the aestheticization o f knowledge can be detected also in its view o f morality. In one sense, as we have seen, M arx wishes to aestheticize morality, shifting it from a set o f supra-historical norms to a question o f the pleasurable realization o f historical powers as an end in itself. In another sense, however, M arxism takes the point o f K an t’s austerely anti-aesthetic Sollen. Such a stark concept o f duty need by no m eans be simply repressive ideology, whatever it might signify in the hands o f K an t himself. On the contrary, its force can be felt in the tragic narratives o f socialist struggle, where men and women have courageously sacrificed their own fulfilment for what they have hoped would be the greater happiness o f others. Such selfsacrificial action, perform ed with little pleasure and often with less profit, is, one might claim, a kind o f love; and though love and well­ being may be ultimately at one, they can enter into tragic conflict with one another in anything less than the long term. F o r a general happiness to flourish, it would seem that individual gratification must som etim es be forgone. M arxism is thus not a hedonism, even though it is all about the enjoyable self-realization o f individuals; indeed M arx has som e acute comments on the material basis o f hedonist ideology in The German Ideology. ‘ Sacrifice’ is a potentially treacherous moral notion, to be handled 228

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with circumspection. It has been, for example, the traditional prerogative o f women; if men have the happiness, women have the love. If the idea o f self-sacrifice is to be more than oppressive and life-denying, it must be viewed in the context o f a wider richness o f life, and so seen under the sign o f irony. In the regimes under which we live, the successful achievements we are afforded are usually somewhat trivial in contrast to the enduring reality o f failure. Radicals are those who seek to preserve in some way a compact with failure, to remain faithful to it; but there is then always a dangerous temptation to fetishize it, forgetting that it is not in that, but in human plenitude and affirmation, that the end o f political action lies. T h e tragic lesson o f M arxism is that no such plentitude is attainable without having gone right the way through failure and dispossession, in order to em erge somewhere on the other side. M arxism subsists, then, in the twilight zone between two worlds, the one too much with us, the other as yet pow erless to be bom . If it clings to the protocols o f analytic reason, and insists upon unpleasurable political responsibilities, it does so ironically, in the awareness that these necessities are in the name o f a future where they will no longer be so essential. It is in this sense that there is for M arxism both rupture and continuity between present and future, as opposed to those brands o f reformism, apocalypticism or ‘bad* utopianism which slacken this difficult dialectic at either pole. What one might call ‘bad’ or prem ature utopianism grabs instantly for a future, projecting itself by an act o f will or imagination beyond the compromised political structures o f the present. By failing to attend to those forces or faultlines mithin the present which, developed o r prised open in particular ways, might induce that condition to surpass itself into a future, such utopianism is in danger o f persuading us to desire uselessly rather than feasibly, and so, like the neurotic, to fall ill with longing. A desirable but unfeasible future, one which fails to found itself in the potentialities o f the present in order to bridge us beyond it, is in this sen se the reverse o f the future offered to u s by some brands o f social determ inism , which is inevitable but not necessarily desirable. Once m ore, ‘value* must be somehow extrapolable from ‘ fact’, the outline o f a future worth struggling for discerned within the practices o f the degraded present. It is this, surely, which is the most vital meaning o f that currently contemned term, teleology. A utopian thought which docs not simply risk making us ill is one able to trace within the 229

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present that secret lack o f identity with itse lf which is the spot where a feasible future might germinate - the place where the future overshadows and hollows out the present’s spurious repleteness. T h e hopeful side o f the narrative is exactly that Value’ is somehow derivable, historically speaking, from ‘fact* - that oppressive social orders, as a matter o f their routine operations, cannot help generating the kinds o f forces and desires which can in principle overthrow them. T h e grim mer side o f the narrative is then that we have, in effect, no way o f undoing the nightmare o f history other than with the few poor, contaminated instruments with which that history has furnished us. How can history be turned against itself? M arx’s own response to this dilemma was the boldest imaginable. History would be transform ed by its most contaminated products, by those bearing the most livid marks o f its brutality. In a condition in which the powerful run insanely rampant, only the pow erless can provide an im age o f that humanity which must in its turn come to power, and in doing so transfigure the very meaning o f that term.

Nota 1 Pierre Bourdicu and Alain Darbel, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979), p. 573. 2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: Early Writings, introduced by Lucio Colletti (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 356. Hereafter cited as ‘Colletti, EPM\ 3 Colletti, EPM, p. 355. 4 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford, 1987), p. 244. 5 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Oxford, 1987), p. 35. 6 Colletti, EPM, p. 352. See also I. Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London, 1970), Part 2, chapter 7. 7 Ibid., p. 360. 8 Ibid., p. 361. 9 Ibid., p. 361. 10 Ibid., p. 359. 11 Ibid., p. 351. 12 Ibid., p. 353. 13 Ibid., p. 354. 14 Ibid., p. 364. 15 Margaret Rose, Marx's Lost Aesthetic (Cambridge, 1984), p. 74. 16 Colletti, EPM, p. 365.

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17 Quoted by S. S. Prawcr, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford, 1976), p. 41. 18 Karl Mart, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 511. 19 Colletti, EPM, pp. 352-3. 20 See David McLcllan, Marx Before Marxism (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 243-4. 21 Colletti, EPM, p. 354. 22 See Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art o f Karl Marx (London, 1973), pp. 95-6. 23 W .J.T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago, 1986), p. 188. 24 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Introduced by Ernest Mandcel (Harmonds­ worth, 1976), p. 165. 25 Ibid., p. 167. 26 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 149. 27 Colletti, EPM, p. 186. 28 Ibid., p. 234. 29 Ibid., p. 233. 30 Ibid., p. 234. 31 Ibid., p. 88. 32 Ibid., p. 89. 33 Ibid., p. 89. 34 Quoted in Prawcr, Karl Marx and World Literature, p. 291. 35 Colletti, EPM , p. 329. 36 See Marx Grundrisse, pp. 110-11. 37 Ibid., p. 706. 38 Ibid., p. 488. 39 Colletti, EPM , p. 358. 40 For an interesting account of the semiotics of this text, see Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition (Berkeley, 1977). See also JeanFrançois Lyotard’s comments on the ‘ Marxist sublime* in Lisa Appignancsi (ed.), Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4 (London, 1986): ‘What is the sublime in Marx? Very precisely it is to be found at the point he calls labour force . . . This is a metaphysical notion. And within metaphysics, it is a notion which designates what is not determinate. W'hat is not present and supports presence . . . The whole theory of exploitation rests on this idea, which is sublime* (p. 11). 41 If intertextuality is the theme of the following passage, it is also its form. I have drawn here, in adapted form, on various of my previous comments on The Eighteenth Brumaire, from Criticism and Ideology (London, 1976), Walter Benjamin; or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981), ‘Marxism and the Past*, in Salmagundi (Fall 1985-Winter 1986), and *The God that Failed’, in Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson

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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

(eds), Re-Membering Milton (New York and London, 1987). I trust that this is the last time I shall write on this text. M arx and Engels: Selected Works (London, 1968), p. 98. S ee Walter Benjamin, ‘T heses on the Philosophy o f History’, in I lannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London, 1973). Marx and Engels: Selected Works, p. 99. T heodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London, 1973), p. 6. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 320. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 266. G . A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory o f History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978), p. 105. Ibid., p. 129.

50 Ibid., p. 131. 51 Ibid., p. 131. 52 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, quoted by Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory o f History, p. 25. For an excellent account o f the simultaneously emancipatory and oppressive development o f capitalism, sec Marshall Berman, A ll That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York, 1982), Part 11. 53 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488. 54 Ibid., p. 541. 55 Cohen, K arl M arx’s Theory o f History, p. 147. 56 Jon Elster, Making Sense o f Marx (Cambridge, 1985), p. 304. 57 Ibid., p. 246n. Elster is admittedly writing here o f the labour process itself, rather than o f the productive forces proper, but the point has perhaps a more general application. 58 Andrew Levine and Eric Olin Wright, ‘Rationality and C lass Struggle’, in New Left Review, no. 123 (Septem ber-October, 1980), p. 66. 59 Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 799-800. 60 For the issue o f morality' in Marxism, sec E. Kamcnka, Alarxtsm and Ethics (London, 1969), Kate Soper, On Human Needs {Brighton, 1981), Denys T urner, Marxism and Christianity (Oxford, 1983), Hugo Meyncll, Freud, M arx and Morals (London, 1981), G . Brenkert, Marx's Ethics of Freedom (London, 1983), Steven Lukes, ‘Marxism, Morality and Justice’ in G . H. R. Parkinson (ed.), M arx and Marxism (Cambridge, 1982), Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford, 1985), B. Oilman, Alienation (Cambridge, 1971), Part 1, chapter 4, M . Cohen, T . Nagel and T . Scanlon (eds), Marxism, Justice and History (Princeton, 1980), and Norman G eras, ‘On Marx and Justice’, New Left Review, no. 150 (M arch-A pril 1985). On the question o f the realization o f human capacities, it is interesting that Marx wrote, and then crossed out, the

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following passage in The German Ideology (quoted in Agnes Heller, The Theory o f Needs in Marx (London, 1974, p. 43): Communist organisation has a two-fold effect on the desires produced in the individual by present-day conditions: some o f these desires - namely those existing under all conditions, which only change their form and direction under different social conditions - arc merely altered by the communist social system, for they arc given the opportunity to develop normally; others, however - namely those originating in a particular social system . . . - are totally deprived o f their conditions o f existence. 61 For a b rief critique o f the notion o f self-realization, see Jon Elster, An Introduction to Kart Marx (Cambridge, 1986), chapter 3. For a more extended, detailed and illuminating account o f M arx's ‘productivism’, see Kate Soper, On Human Needs, especially chapters 8 and 9. 62 S ec Jü rgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, chapter 3, and The Iheory o f Communicative Action, vol. 1 (Boston, 1984), chapter 4. For an excellent critique o f the ‘philosophy o f the subject’, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), chapter 4. 63 Haberm as, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 44. 64 Lcszck Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 11: The Breakd/)wn (Oxford, 1978), p. 271. 65 Ibid., p. 270. 66 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488. 67 Marx, Capital, vol. 11 (New York, 1967), p. 820. 68 See Denys Turner, Marxism and Christianity (Oxford, 1983), Part 1.

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True Illusions: Friedrich Nietzsche It is not difficult to trace certain general parallels between historical materialism and the thought o f Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche is in his own way a full-blooded materialist, whatever scant regard he may pay to the labour process and its social relations. One might say that the root o f all culture for Nietzsche is the human body, were it not that the body itself is for him a mere ephem eral expression o f the will to power. H e asks him self in The Gay Science whether philosophy has ‘not been merely an interpretation o f the body and a misunderstanding o f the body’, 1 and notes with mock solemnity in the Twilight o f the Idols that no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude o f the human nose. Nietzsche has more than a smack o f vulgar Schopenhauerian physiologism about him, a s when he speculates that the spread o f Buddhism may be attributed to a loss o f vigour consequent on the Indian diet o f rice. But he is right to identify the body as the enormous blindspot o f all traditional philosophy: ‘philosophy says away with the body, this wretched idée fixe o f the sen ses, infected with all the faults o f logic that exist, refuted, even im possible, although it be impudent enough to pose as if it were real!’2 H e, by contrast, will return to the body and attempt to think everything through again in terms o f it, grasping history', art and reason as the unstable products o f its needs and drives. H is work thus p resses the original project o f aesthetics to a revolutionary extreme, for the body in Nietzsche returns with a vengeance as the ruin o f all disinterested speculation. T h e aesthetic, he writes in Nietzsche Contra Wagner; is ‘applied physiology’. It is the body, for Nietzsche, which produces whatever truth we can achieve. T h e world is the way it is only because o f the peculiar

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structure o f our senses, and a different biology- would deliver us a different universe entirely. T ruth is a function o f the material evolution o f the species: it is the passin g effect o f our sensuous interaction with our environment, the upshot o f what we need to survive and flourish. T h e will to truth m eans constructing the kind o f world within which one’s powers can best thrive and one’s drives m ost freely function. T h e urge to knowledge is an impulse to conquer, an apparatus for simplifying and falsifying the rich ambiguity o f things so that we might take possession o f them. T ruth is just reality tamed and tabulated by our practical needs, and logic is a false equivalencing in the interests o f survival. I f K an t’s transcendental unity o f apperception has any m eaning at all, it refers not to the ghostly form s o f the mind but to the provisional unity o f the body. W e think as we do because o f the sort o f bodies we have, and the complex relations with reality which this entails. It is the body rather than the mind which interprets the world, chops it into m anageable chunks and assigns it approximate m eanings. What ‘knows’ is our multiple sensory powers, which are not only artefacts in them selves - the products o f a tangled history - but the sources o f artefacts, generating as they do those life-enhancing fictions by which we prosper. T hought, to be sure, is more than just a biological reflex: it is a specialized function o f our drives which can refine and spiritualize them over time. But it remains the case that everything we think, feel and do moves within a frame o f interests rooted in our ‘species being’, and can have no reality independently o f this. Com m unication itself, which for N ietzsche as for M arx is effectively synonymous with consciousness, develops only under duress, as part o f a material struggle for survival, however much we may later come to delight in it as an activity in itself. T h e body, a ‘richer, clearer, m ore tangible phenomenon’ than consciousness,3 figures in effect for N ietzsche as the unconscious - as the subm erged sub-text o f all our m ore finely reflective life. Thought is thus symptomatic o f material force, and a ‘psychology’ is that sceptical hermeneutic which lays bare the lowly motives which impel it. One does not so much contest ideas as find inscribed within them the traces o f humanity’s hungering. T hinkin g is thus inherently ‘ideological’, the sem iotic mark o f a violence that now lies erased beneath it. W hat fascinates N ietzsche is the incessant hankering which lies at the core o f reason, the malice, rancour or ecstasy' which drives it on, the deployment o f instinct in

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instinct’s ow n rep ression ; what he atten ds to in a d iscou rse is the low m urm ur o f the body speaking, in all o f its greed or guilt, L.ike M arx, N ietzsch e is out to bring down thought’s cred u lou s trust in its own autonom y, and above all that ascetic spirituality (w hether its nam e is scien ce, religion o r philosophy) which turns its ey es in horror from the blood an d toil in which id eas are actually born . T h a t blood and toil is w hat he nam es ‘genealogy’, in contrast to the consoling evolutionism o f ‘history’. (‘T h at gruesom e dom inion o f n on sen se and accident th at has so far been called “ history’” , he scoffs in Beyond Good and E vil.)4 G en ealog)' unm asks the d isreputable origins o f noble notions, the ch an cin ess o f their functions, illum inating the dark w orkshop w here all thought is fashioned. H igh -ton ed m oral values are the b loodstain ed fruit o f a barbarous history o f debt, torture, obligation, revenge, the w hole horrific p ro cess by w hich the hum an anim al w as system atically degutted and debilitated to be ren dered fit for civilized society. H istory is just a m orbid m oralization through which hum anity learns to be ash am ed o f its own instincts, and ‘ever)' sm allest ste p on earth has been paid for by spiritual and physical torture . . . how m uch blood and cruelty lies at the bottom o f all “ good th in gs” !’5 F o r N ietzsch e as for M arx, ‘m orality’ is not so m uch a m atter o f p ro b lem s as a problem all in itself; ph ilosoph ers may have queried th is or that m oral value, but they have not yet problem atized the very co n cep t o f m orality, w hich for N ietzsche is ‘m erely a sign language o f the affe cts’.6 R ather a s for M arx the productive forces becom e sh ackled and constrain ed by a set o f social relations, so fo r N ietzsch e the productive life-in stin cts are enfeebled and corrupted into what we know as m oral sub jecth ood, the gutless, abstract ‘h e rd ’ m orality o f conventional society'. T h is is essentially a m ovem ent from coercion to hegem ony: ‘M orality is p receded by compulsion,, in deed, it itself rem ains com p ulsion for som e tim e, to which one su b m its to avoid d isagreeab le co n seq u en ces. L a te r it becom es cu stom , later still free obedien ce, and finally alm ost becom es instinct: then, like every thing long custom ary and natural, it is linked with gratification - and now is called virtue.’7 W hat we have seen in R ou sseau and oth er m id dle-class m oralists a s the suprem ely positive ‘aesth etic’ transition from law to spontaneity, naked pow er to pleasurable habit, is fo r N ietzsche the last w ord in self-rep ression . T h e old barbaric law yields to the Ju d a e o -C h ristia n invention o f the ‘free’ subject, a s a m asochistic 236

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introjection o f authority opens up that interior space o f guilt, sickness and bad conscience which som e like to call ‘ subjectivity*. Healthy vital instincts, unable to discharge themselves for fear o f social disruption, turn inward to give birth to the ‘soul*, the police agent within each individual. T h e inward world thickens and expands, acquires depth and import, thus heralding the death o f ‘wild, free, prowling men*8 w ho injured and exploited without a care. T h e new moral creature is an ‘aestheticizcd’ subject, in so far as power has now become pleasure; but it signals at the sam e time the dem ise o f the old style o f aesthetic human animal, which lived out its beautiful barbaric instincts in splendid unconstraint. S u ch , for N ietzsche, were the warriors who originally im posed their despotic powers on a population humbly waiting to be hammered into shape. ‘T h eir work is an instinctive creation and imposition o f form s; they are the m ost involuntary, unconscious artists there are . . . T h ey do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are, these bom organisers; they exemplify that terrible artists* egoism that h as the look o f bronze and knows itself justified to ail eternity in its ‘‘work” , like a mother in her child.*9 It is this brutal ruling-class dominion which drives underground the free instincts o f those it subjugates, creating the self-loathing life o f science, religion, asceticism . But such sickly subjecthood is thus the product o f a magnificent artistry, and reflects that formative discipline in its own festering masochism : T h is secret self-ravishment, this artists’ cruelty, this delight in im posing a form on on eself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material and in burning a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a no into it, this uncanny, dreadfully joyous labour o f a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer out o f joy in making suffer - eventually this entirely active 4bad conscience’ - you will have guessed it - as the womb o f all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to light an abundance o f strange new beauty and affirmation, and perhaps beauty itself — 10 T h ere is no question o f N ietzsche simply regretting the horrific birth o f the humanist subject, unlike som e o f his less wary modern-day 237

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acolytes. In its alluring unity o f discipline and spontaneity, sadistic form and malleable material, such a craven, self-punitive animal is an aesthetic artefact all o f its own. If art is rape and violation, the hum anist subject reaps the perverse aesthetic delights o f a ceaseless self-violation, a sado-m asochism Nietzsche much admires. And since art is that phenomenon which gives the law to itself, rather than receiving it passively from elsewhere, there is a sense in which the anguished moral se lf is a more exemplary aesthetic type than the old warrior class, who m aster an essentially alien material. T h e authentic art work is creature and creator in one, which is truer o f the moral subject than o f the imperious war-lord. T h ere is something beautiful about the bad conscience: Nietzsche derives erotic stimulation from humanity’s self-torture, and so, he implies, does humanity itself. M oreover, this compulsively self-ravishing creature is not only a work o f art in itself, but the source o f all sublimation, and so o f all aesthetic phenom ena. Culture has its roots in self-odium , and triumphantly vindicates that sorry condition. All o f this may seem gratifyingly remote from M arxism ; but the parallel lies in a certain shared teleologism, however uncomfortably the word may ring in the ears o f at least Nietzsche’s present-day disciples. Teleology is a grossly unfashionable concept today even am ong M arxists, let alone Nietzscheans; but like many a demonized notion it is perhaps due for a little redemption. F o r Nietzsche, the breaking down o f the old, reliable instinctual structure o f the human animal is on the one hand a catastrophic loss, bringing forth the cringing, self-lacerating subject o f moral ideology, and throwing humanity on the mercy o f that most treacherous, deluded o f all its faculties, consciousness. On the other hand, this declension marks a m ajor advance: if the corruption o f instinct makes human life more precarious, it also opens up at a stroke fresh possibilities o f experiment and adventure. T h e repression o f the drives is the basis o f all great art and civilization, leaving as it does a void in human being which culture alone can fill. M oral man is thus an essential bridge or transition to the overman: only when the old savage inclinations have been sublim ed by the imposition o f ‘herd’ morality, by the craven love o f the law, will the human animal o f the future be able to take these propensities in hand and bend them to his autonomous will. T h e subject is bom in sickness and subjection; but this is an essential workshop for the tempering and organizing o f otherwise destructive 238

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pow ers, which in the shape o f the overman will burst through moral form ations as a new kind o f productive force. T h e individual o f the future will then buckle such powers to the task o f forging him self into a free creature, releasing difference, heterogeneity and unique selfhood from the dull compulsion o f a hom ogeneous ethics. T h e death o f instinct and the birth o f the subject is in this sense a fortunate Fall, in which our perilous reliance on calculative reason is at once an insidious softening o f fibre and the advent o f an enriched existence. T h e moral law was necessary in its day for the refining o f hum an powers, but has now becom e a fetter which m ust be thrown off. ‘Profoundest gratitude for that which morality has achieved hitherto*, Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, ‘but now it is only a burden which may becom e a fatality!’11 ‘Many chains have been placed upon m an’, he remarks in The Wanderer and his Shadow, ‘that he might unlearn behaving as an animal: and in point o f fact he has becom e milder, more spiritual, more joyful, and more circum spect than any animal. But now he still suffers from having borne his chains too long . . . 12 T h ere can be no sovereign individual without straitjacketing custom : having been disciplined to internalize a despotic law which flattens them to faceless m onads, human beings are now ready for that higher aesthetic self-governm ent in which they will bestow the law upon themselves, each in his or her own uniquely autonom ous way. One kind o f introjection, in short, will yield ground to another, in which the wealth o f evolved consciousness will be incorporated as a fresh kind o f instinctual structure, lived out with all the robust spontaneity o f the old barbaric drives. T h ere is surely a remote analogy between this vision and historical m aterialism . F o r M arxism , too, the transition from traditional society to capitalism involves a falsely hom ogenizing law - o f economic exchange, or bourgeois democracy - which erodes concrete particu­ larity to a shadow. B ut this ‘fall* is felicitous, one upwards rather than downwards, since within this dull carapace o f abstract equality are fostered the very forces which might break beyond the kingdom o f necessity to som e future realm o f freedom , difference and excess. In necessarily fashioning the organized collective worker, and in evolving a plurality o f historical powers, capitalism for M arx plants the seeds o f its own dissolution as surely as the epoch o f the subject in N ietzsche’s eyes prepares the ground for that which will overturn it. And M arx, like N ietzsche, would som etim es seem to view this 239

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overturning as an overcom ing o f m orality as such. W hen N ietzsche sp eak s o f the way in which co n scio u sn ess abstracts an d im poverishes the real, h is language is cognate with M arx ’s d iscou rse on exchange value: O w ning to the nature o f animal consciousness, the world o f which we can becom e conscious is only a su rface- and sign -w orld, a w orld that is m ade com m on an d m eaner; w hatever becom es conscious becomes by the sam e token shallow , thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all b ecom in g con scious involves a great and thorough corruption , falsification, reduction to superficialities, and genera lization.n W hat is tru e o f co n scio u sn ess as such, in N ietzsch e’s extrem e nom inalist view , is for M arx an effect o f com m odification, w hereby a com plex w ealth o f use-value is stripped to a m eagre index o f exchange. F o r both philosophers, how ever, history m oves by its bad side: if for M arx this com m odifying p ro cess em an cipates humanity from the privilege and parochialism o f traditional society, laying down the con dition s for free, equ al, universal intercourse, fo r N ietzsche the dreary narrative o f hum anity’s ‘becom ing calculable’ is a necessity o f its sp ecies-b ein g, for without such calculability it w ould never survive. L o gic is a fiction in N ietzsch e’s eyes, since no two things can be identical; bu t like the equivalencing o f exchange value, it is at once repressive an d potentially em ancipatory. T h e p resen t age, then, is for both N ietzsche an d M arx p ro p ae­ deutic to a m ore desirable condition, at once im pedin g and enabling it, a protective m atrix now definitively outgrow n. I f the two are alike in this resp ect, they are also strikingly sim ilar in oth ers. Both scorn all anodyne idealism and otherw orldliness: ‘T h e true w orld,’ com m ents N ietzsche in notably M arxist idiom , ‘h as been erected on a contradiction o f the real w orld.’ 14 E ach lays claim to an energy - o f production, ‘life’ or the will to pow er - which is the source and m easure o f all value but lies beyond such value. T h e y are equally at one in their negative utopianism , which specifies the general form s o f a future rath er than p re-drafts its contents; and each im agines that future in term s o f su rp lu s, excess, overcom ing, incom m ensurability, recovering a lost sen su o u sn ess and specificity through a transfigured 240

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concept o f m e asu re . Both thinkers deconstruct idealized unities into their co n cealed m aterial conflictiveness, and are deeply wary o f all altruistic rh etoric, beneath which they detect the fugitive m otions o f pow er and self-in terest. I f only those actions are m oral which are done purely fo r the sake o f oth ers, N ietzsche rem arks wryly in Dawn, then there are no m oral actions at all. N either theorist ascrib es a high value to co n scio u sn ess, which is berated for its idealist hubris and thrust back to its m o d est location within a broad er field o f historical determ inations. F o r N ietzsch e, co n scio u sn ess a s su ch is incurably idealist, stam p in g a deceptively stable ‘bein g’ on the m aterial p ro cess o f ‘ch ange, becom in g, m ultiplicity, opposition, contradiction, w ar’ .15 F o r M arx, th is m etaphysical or reificatory im pulse o f the m ind w ould seem to inhere in the specific conditions o f com m odity fetishism , w here ch ange is sim ilarly frozen and naturalized. Both are sceptical o f the category o f the subject, although N ietzsche a good deal m ore so than M arx. F o r the later M arx, the subject appears sim ply as a su p p ort for the social structure; in N ietzsch e’s view the subject is a m ere trick o f gram m ar, a convenient fiction to sustain the deed. I f N ie tzsch e ’s thought can be paralleled to M arxism , it can also be deciph ered b y it. T h e contem pt which N ietzsche evinces for b o u rgeois m orality is un derstan dable enough in the condition s o f the G erm an em p ire o f his tim e, w here the m iddle class w as for the m ost part content to seek influence within B ism arck’s autocratic regim e rather than o ffe r it a decisive political challenge. D eferen tial and pragm atic, the G erm an bourgeoisie disow ned its historic revolution­ ary role for the ben efits o f a capitalism installed in large m easu re from ‘abo ve’ - by the protectionist Bism arckian state itse lf - and for the protection w hich such an accom m odation to ru lin g-class policies m ight furnish against what w as rapidly to becom e the greatest socialist party in the world. Deprived o f proper political representation by B ism arck ’s im placable opposition to parliam entary governm ent, thwarted and oversh adow ed by an arrogant aristocratism , the m iddle class co m p rom ised and m anoeuvred within the stru ctu res o f state pow er, tim orous in its political dem an ds on its su p erio rs and terrified by the sw elling socialist clam our o f its subordinates. In the face o f this inert, con form ist stratum N ietzsche sw aggeringly affirm s the virile, free-boo tin g values o f the old nobility or w arrior caste. Yet it is equally possible to see this autarchic individualism a s an idealized version o f the bourgeoisie itself, with all the daring, 241

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dynam ism and self-sufficien cy it m ight attain in m ore propitious social circu m stan ces. T h e active, adventurous Übermensch casts a nostalgic g lan ce backw ards to the old military nobility; but in his insolently explicit en terprise he also prefigures a reconstituted bourgeois su b ject. T o have and to w ant to have m ore - growth, in one w ord - that is life itse lf’, com m ents N ietzsche in The Will to Power, in the co u rse o f an an ti-socialist diatribe. I f only m an u factu rers were noble, he reflects in The Gay Science, there m ight not be any socialism o f the m asse s. T h e p ro ject, how ever, is m ore com plex and p aradoxical than som e C arlylean o r D israelian dream o f graftin g the heroic vigour o f aristocracy onto a leaden bourgeoisie. It concerns, rather, an acute contradiction within the m iddle class itself. T h e p roblem is that the m oral, religiou s and juridical ‘su p erstru ctu re’ o f that class is entering into conflict with its own productive energies. C o n scien ce, duty, legality are essential foundations o f the bourgeois social order; yet they also serv e to im pede the unbridled self-d evelopm en t o f the bou rgeois su b ject. T h a t self-developm ent is ironically at od d s with the very ‘m etaph ysical’ values - absolute groun d s, stab le identities, un fissured continuities - upon which m id dle-class society trades for its political security. T h e dream o f each entrepren eur is to be wholly un constrain ed in his own activity, while receiving protection in the corporate form s o f law, politics, religion and eth ics from the potentially in juriou s activities o f oth ers o f his kind. S u c h constraints, how ever, m u st then apply equally to him self, un derm inin g the very autonom y they were m eant to safegu ard . Individual sovereignty and in com m ensurability are o f the essen ce, yet w ould seem attainable only by a h erd-like levelling an d hom ogenizing. A s sh eer anarchic p ro cess or productive force, the bourgeois su b ject th reatens in its sublim ely in exhaustible becom ing to undercut the very stabilizing social rep resen tation s it req u ires. It is the bourgeois him self, if only he w ould acknow ledge it, who is the true an arch ist and nihilist, kicking aw ay at every step the m etaphysical foundation on w hich he d ep en d s. T o realize itse lf fully, then, this stran ge, self-thw arting su b ject m u st som ehow overthrow itself; and this is surely a central m ean in g o f the self-overcom in g Übermensch. T h e aesth etic a s selfactualization is in conflict with the aesthetic a s so cial harm ony, and N ietzsch e is recklessly prepared to sacrifice the latter to the form er. B o u rg eo is m an a s m oral, legal and political su b je ct is ‘m ore sick, 242

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uncertain, changeable, indeterminate than any other animal, there is no doubt o f that - he is the sick animal’; 16 yet he is also the bold adventurer who has ‘ dared more, done m ore new things, braved more and challenged fate more than all the other animals put together: he, the great experimenter with himself, discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals, nature, and gods for ultimate dominion - he, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace . . . V 7 T h is magnificent self-entrepreneurship tragically entails the morbid germ o f conscious­ ness; but Nietzsche will, so to speak, lift such productive dynamism from ‘base* to ‘superstructure’, shattering the metaphysical form s o f the latter with the furious creativity o f the former. Both subjects and objects are for N ietzsche mere fictions, the provisional effects o f deeper forces. Such an eccentric view is perhaps no more than the daily truth o f the capitalist order: the objects which are for N ietzsche sheer transient nodes o f force are as comm odities no more than ephemeral points o f exchange. T h e ‘objective’ world for N ietzsche, if one can speak in such term s, would seem at once turbulently vital and blankly m eaningless - an accurate enough phenomenology, no doubt, o f market society. T h e human subject, for all its ontological privilege, is likewise stripped in such conditions to the reflex o f deeper, more determinant processes. It is this fact that N ietzsche will seize on and turn to advantage, hollowing out this already deconstructed figure to clear a path for the advent o f the overman. As the ideal entrepreneur o f the future, this bold creature h as learnt to relinquish all the old consolations o f soul, essence, identity, continuity, living provisionally and resourcefully, riding with the vital current o f life itself. In him, the existing social order has com e to sacrifice its security to its liberty, em bracing the groundless­ n ess o f existence as the very source o f its ceaseless self-experiment. If bourgeois society is caught in a cleft stick between energy and ontology, between prosecuting its ends and legitimating them, then the latter must yield to the former. T o allow the old metaphysical subject to splinter apart is to tap direcdy into the will to power itself, appropriating this force to fashion a new, ungrounded, aesthetic being who carries his justification entirely in himself. In a reversal o f Kierkegaard, ethics will then have given way to aesthetics, as the fiction o f a stable order is swept aside for the more authentic fiction o f eternal self-creation. 243

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T h e m ost notable difference between Nietzsche and M arx is that N ietzsche is not a M arxist. Indeed he is not only not a M arxist, but a belligerent opponent o f almost every enlightened liberal or democratic value. We m ust resist all sentimental weakness, he reminds himself: ‘life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering o f what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition o f one’s own form s, incorporation, and at least, at its mildest, exploitation . . . V 8 M uch o f N ietzsche’s writing reads like a brochure for a youth adventure scheme, or the dyspeptic grousings at liberal effeteness o f som e pensioned-off Pentagon general. H e desires spirits strengthened by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become needs; it would require habituation to the keen air o f the heights, to winter journeys, to ice and mountains in every sense; it would require even a kind o f sublim e wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health.19 W e must steel ourselves to the sufferings o f others, and ride our chariots over the morbid and decadent. Sympathy and com passion as we have them are the diseased virtues o f Judaeo-Christianity, sym ptom s o f that self-odium and disgust for life which the lower orders, in their rancorous resentment, have by a stroke o f genius persuaded their own masters to internalize. T h e poor have cunningly infected the strong with their own loathsome nihilism, so Nietzsche will speak up in turn for cruelty and delight in domination, for ‘everything haughty, manly, conquering, domineering*.20 Like William Blake, he suspects that pity and altruism are the acceptable faces o f aggression, pious m asks o f a predatory regim e; and he can see nothing in socialism but a disastrous extension o f abstract levelling. Socialism is insuffiendy revolutionary, a mere collectivized version o f the enfeebled bourgeois virtues which fails to challenge the whole fetish o f morality and o f the subject. It is simply an alternative brand o f social ethics, bound in this sense to its political antagonist; the only worthwhile future must involve a transvaluation o f all values. O ne does not have to glimpse in Nietzsche a precursor o f the T h ird Reich to be repelled by this grovelling self-abasem ent before the phallus, with all its brutal misogyny and militarist fantasizing. If 244

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N ietzsche means such talk as ‘the annihilation o f the decaying races’ literally, then his ethics are appalling; if he intends it metaphorically, then he is recklessly irresponsible and cannot be entirely exculpated from the sinister uses to which such ugly rhetoric was later put. It is rem arkable how blandly most o f his present-day acolytes have edited out these more repugnant features o f the Nietzschean creed, as a previous generation edited in a proto-fascist anti-Semitism . T h e Ubermenschy to be sure, is not some latter-day G enghis Khan letting rip his m urderous im pulses but a tem pered, refined individual o f serenity and self-control, sensitive and magnanimous in his bearing. Indeed one proper objection to him is less that he will exterminate the poor than that he represents little advance, for all the flamboyant flourishing with which he is heralded, on the well-balanced, selfdisciplined individual o f a familiar cultural idealism. Even so, it is a crucial distinction between Nietzsche and M arx that the release o f individual human powers from the fetters o f social uniformity - a goal which both thinkers propose - is to be achieved for M arx in and through the free self-realization o f all, and for N ietzsche in disdainful isolation. Nietzsche’s contempt for human solidarity belongs with his fundamental values, not simply with his denunciation o f a current conform ism . T h e overman may display com passion and benevolence, but these are simply aspects o f the pleasurable exercise o f his powers, the noble decision o f the strong to unbend magnanimously to the weak. I f he decides that such com passionate unbending is inappropri­ ate, then the weak are at his mercy. It is aesthetically gratifying from time to time for the overman to deploy his fullness o f strength to succour others, always delightfully conscious that he could equally use it to crush them. G iven that the free individual cannot be the product o f collective action, N ietzsche’s answer to how he em erges at all m ust remain somewhat vacuous. It cannot be by voluntarist transformation, since N ietzsche has no time for such mental fictions as ‘acts o f will’. Indeed ‘will power’ and Svill to power’ would seem effective opposites in his th ought But nor can it be by any vulgar historical evolutionism, for the overman strikes violendy, unpredictably into the complacent continuum o f history. It would just seem the case that certain privileged subjects such as Friedrich N ietzsche are able mysteriously to transcend the nihilism o f m odem life and leap at a bound into another dimension. Such a leap can certainly not occur through the 245

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exercise o f critical reason, which N ietzsche believes impossible. How could the intellect, that crude, fumbling instrument o f the will to power, pick itself up by its own bootstraps and reflect critically on the interests o f which it is the blind expression? ‘A critique o f the faculty o f knowledge’, Nietzsche writes, ‘is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticise itself when it can only use itself for the critique?’21 Lik e several o f his present-day followers, he would seem to assum e that all such critique entails a serene disinterestedness; and then there is nothing between this im possible metalinguistic dream and a starkly H obbesian conception o f reason as the obedient slave o f power. Cognition, as we have seen, is just a fictional simplification o f the world for pragmatic ends: like the artefact itself, the concept edits, schem atizes, disregards the inessential, in a reductive falsification essential for ‘life’. T h ere would seem no way, then, in which it could gain an analytic hold on its own operations, even if Nietzsche’s own writings would appear paradoxically to do precisely this. As Jürgen H aberm as has rem arked, Nietzsche ‘denies the critical power o f reflection with and only with the means of reflection itself\n M arx, for his part, would endorse N ietzsche’s insistence on the practical nature o f knowledge, its anchorage in material interests, but reject the pragm atist corollary that an overall emancipatory critique is thereby necessarily undercut. What concerns M arx are just those historically specific, ‘perspectival’ interests which, being what they are, can only realize themselves by passing over from their own particularity to a profoundly interested enquiry into the structure o f a whole social formation. T h e link for M arx between local and general, pragmatic and totalizing thought, is secured in the first place by the contradictory nature o f class society itself, which would require global transforma­ tion if certain highly specific dem ands were to find their fulfilment. I f Nietzsche is able to know that all reasoning is simply the product o f the will to power, then this knowledge itse lf shares something o f reason’s classical range and authority, unlocking the very essence o f the real. It is just that this essence turns out to be the truth that there are only ever sectoral interpretations, all o f which are in fact false. T h e quarrel between M arx and N ietzsche turns not on whether there is som ething m ore fundamental than reasoning - both thinkers insist that there is - but on the consequent locus and status o f reason within this more determining context T o dethrone reason from its vainglorious suprem acy is not necessarily to reduce it to the function 246

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o f a can -op en er. Indeed ju st a s N ietzsche at one point acknow ledges that reason an d passion are not sim ple opposites - it is m istaken, he arg u es in The Will to Power; to talk as if every passion d id not p o sse ss its quantum o f reason - so critical reason for M arxism is a potential within the grow th o f historical interests. T h e critical reason which m ight enable an overcom ing o f capitalism is for M arx im m anent within that system rather as for N ietzsche reason is a quality im m anent to d esire. M arxist critique is neither p arach uted into history from so m e m etaphysical outer sp ace, nor confined to a reflex o f narrowly particular interests. Instead, it seizes insolendy on the ideals o f b o u rg eo is society itself, and en quires why it is that in current conditions th ose ideals are curiously, persistently unrealizable. M arxism is m u ch preoccu pied with pow er, but refers this issue to certain con flicts o f interest bound up with m aterial production. N ietzsch e, by con trast, hypostasizes pow er a s an end in itself, with no rationale beyond its own self-gratifying expansion. T h e aim o f N ietzsch ean p ow er is not m aterial survival but rich n ess, profusion, ex cess; it stru g gles for no other reason than to realize itself. Ironically, then, there is a sen se in which for N ietzsche pow er is ultimately disin terested. O n the one hand, it is wholly inseparable from the play o f specific in terests; on the other hand, it b roo d s eternally upon its own b ein g in su b lim e indifference to any o f its localized expressions. In this a s in other ways, N ietzsch ean pow er is fundam entally aesthetic: it b e a rs its en ds entirely within itself, positing them a s m ere poin ts o f resistan ce essential to its own self-actualizing. T h ro u gh the contingent g o als it throw s up, pow er returns eternally to itself, and nothing can b e extraneous to it. It is thus that N ietzsch e can be bran ded by H e id e g g e r as the last o f the m etaphysicians - not that the will to pow er is any so rt o f H egelian essen ce behind the w orld (since for N ietzsch e’ s full-blooded phenom enalism there is absolutely nothing beh ind ‘ap p earan ces’), but that it is the sole, fundam ental, universal form the w orld takes. Will to pow'er m eans the dynam ic se lf­ enh ancem ent o f all things in their w arring m ultiplicity, the shifting forcc-field by which they expand, collide, struggle and appropriate; and it is thus no kind o f ‘bein g’ at all. B ut since it d enotes that differential relation o f quanta o f forces which is the sh ape o f everything, it inevitably continues to fulfil the conceptual function o f such ‘bein g’. S o it is that a m o d em devotee o f the m aster, G illes 247

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D eleuze, can write with a certain rhetorical strain that ‘T h e will to pow er is plastic, inseparable from each case in which it is determined; ju st as the eternal return is being, but bein g which is affirm ed o f becom ing, the will to power is unitaiy, but unity which is affirm ed o f multiplicity.’23 W e have already encountered more than once the idea o f a force which is ‘inseparable from each case in which it is determined*, and this is the law o f the aesthetic. T h e will to pow er is and is not a unitary essen ce in just the way that the inner form o f the artefact is and is not a universal law. T h e ‘law* regulating the work o f art is not o f the kind that could be abstracted from it, even provisionally, to becom e the su bject o f argum ent and analysis; it evaporates without trace into the s tu ff o f the artwork as a whole, and so m ust be intuited rather than debated. Ju st the sam e is true o f the N ietzschean will, which is at once the inward shape o f all there is, yet nothing but local, strategic variations o f force. As such, it can provide an absolute principle o f judgem ent or ontological foundation while being nothing o f the sort, as fleeting and quicksilver as the Fichtean process o f becoming. T h e K an tian ‘law* o f taste, similarly, is at once universal and particular to the object. Poised at this conveniendy ambivalent point, the idea o f the will to power can be used in one direction to lam baste those m etaphysicians who would hunt out an essen ce behind appearances, and in another direction to denounce the myopic hedonists, em piricists and utilitarians who are unable to peer beyond their own (mainly English) noses to applaud the mighty cosm ic dram a unfolding around them. It perm its N ietzsche to combine a full-blooded foundationalism , one which has searched out the secret o f all existence, with a scandalous perspectivism which can upbraid as effem inate fantasy the abject will to truth. Will to power is just the universal truth that there is no universal truth, the interpretation that all is interpretation; and this paradox, not least in the hands o f N ietzsch e’s m odem inheritors, allows an iconoclastic radicalism to blend with a prudently pragm atist suspicion o f all ‘global* theorizing. As with Schellingian ‘indifference* or D erridean ‘difference*, it is im possible to trump this quasi-transcendental principle because it is entirely empty. It is worth enquiring whether the will to power is for N ietzsche a m atter o f ‘ fact* or ‘value*. It would seem that it cannot be a good in itself, for if it is coterm inous with everything, by what standard could

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this be assessed? O ne cannot in N ietzsche’s view speak o f the value or valuelessness o f existence as a whole, since this would presuppose som e normative criteria outside o f existence itself. ‘T h e value o f life cannot be estim ated’, he writes in The Twilight o f the Idols; and this is at least one sense in which he is not a nihilist. T h e will to power sim ply is; yet it is also at the source o f all value. T h e sole objective m easure o f value, N ietzsche comments in The Will to Power\ is enhanced and organized power, so that what is valuable is less the will to power ‘in itself*, whatever that m ight mean, than the ways it prom otes and enriches itself in coordinated complexes o f energy. Sin ce human life is one such possible enrichment, N ietzsche can claim that ‘life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values’.24 But the will to power would seem to prom ote and complexify itself anyway, by virtue o f its very ‘essence’. D andelions, for instance, are a triumph o f the will to power, restlessly expanding their dominion by appropriating new areas o f space. I f it belongs to the ‘nature’ o f the will to power to enhance itself, then as a ‘principle’ it hovers indeterminately between fact and value, its sheer existence a perpetual valuation. I f the world for N ietzsche is valueless, m eaningless chaos, then the point would seem to be to create one’s own values in defiance o f its blank indifference. N ietzsche is accordingly stem with those senti­ m ental moralists who hold that to live well is to live in accordance with N ature. Su ch thinkers merely project their own arbitrary values onto reality and then, in an act o f ideological consolation, unite narcissistically with this self-im age. In a subtle gesture o f dominion, philosophy always fashions the world in its own likeness. Nietzsche is out to disrupt this imaginary closure, maliciously rem inding us o f N ature’s sheer amorality: ‘According to nature* you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Im agine a being like nature, wasteful beyond m easure, indifferent beyond m easure, without purposes or consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the sam e time; imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to this indifference?25 Humanity, in what N ietzsche terms a ‘m onstrous stupidity*, regards itself as the m easure o f all things, and considers anything to be 249

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beautiful which reflects back its own visage.26 But the very indifference o f the Nietzschean universe, in contrast to this anthropomorphism, sounds ironically close to som e o f his own most cherished values. He writes in Beyond Good and Evil o f N ature's ‘prodigal and indifferent m agnificence which is outrageous but noble’,27 implying that N ature’s indifference to value is precisely its value. T h e imaginary' circle between humanity and world is thus ruptured with one hand only to be resealed with the other: it is the very haughty heedlessness o f N ature which would seem to mirror N ietzsche’s own ethics. It is in this sense that Nietzsche, for all his mockery o f the sentimentalists, is not exactly an existentialist. At one level, he would indeed appear to argue such a case: the world’s lack o f inherent value forbids you from taking a moral cue from it, leaving you free to generate your own gratuitous values by hammering this brutely m eaningless material into aesthetic shape. T h e ethical here is purely decisionistic: ‘Genuine philosophers . . . are commanders and legislators: they say: thus shall it be!’28 B ut to live in this style is precisely to imitate Nature as it truly is, an achievement beyond the purveyors o f the pathetic fallacy. For the way the world is is no way in particular: reality is will to power, a variable complex o f selfprom oting powers, and to live a life o f autonomous self-realization is therefore to live in accordance with it. It is precisely by becoming an end in oneself that one most accurately mirrors the universe. Nietzsche appears to equivocate between existentialist and naturalistic cases; but this opposition can be deconstructed, to give him the best o f all possible ideological worlds. T h e splendid ungrounded autonomy o f legislating one's own values in the teeth o f an amoral reality can itself be metaphysically grounded, in the way the world essentially is. ‘Life* is hard, savage indifference; but this is a value as much as a fact, a form o f exuberant, indestructible energy' to be ethically imitated. T h e will to power does not dictate any particular values, as the sentimentalists believe o f Nature; it just dem ands that you do what it does, namely live in a changeful, experimental, self-improvisatory style through the shaping o f a multiplicity o f values. In this sense it is the ‘form* o f the will which the overman affirms rather than any moral content, since the will has in fact no moral content. ‘Content henceforth becom es something merely formal - our life included’, N ietzsche writes in The Will to Power.™ And this is one sense in which the will would seem at once the highest kind o f value, and no value at all. 250

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T h ere is a problem, however, about why one should affirm the will to power. O ne cannot call it a value to express this force, since everything expresses it anyway. T h ere is no point in legislating that things should do what they cannot help doing just by virtue o f what they are. What is valuable is enhancing the will; but what is the basis o f this value judgem ent, and whence do we derive the criteria which might determ ine what is to count as an enhancement? D o we just know this aesthetically or intuitively, as when N ietzsche speaks o f the pleasurable feeling o f power? ‘What health is’, rem arks H eidegger ominously in his study o f Nietzsche, ‘only the healthy can say . . . W hat truth is, only one who is truthful can discern.’30 I f the will to power is itself quite amoral, what is so morally positive about enriching it? Why should one cooperate with this force, any more than with a sentimentalized Nature? It is clear that one can choose, like Schopenhauer, to deny the will to power - even though all such denials m ust for Nietzsche be perverted expressions o f it. But it is unclear on what grounds one judges that such negation is bad, and that affirm ing the will is good. U nless, o f course, one has already projected certain supremely positive values into this force, such that prom oting it becom es an indubitable virtue. Cannot the effects o f the will to pow er be celebrated only if one is already in possession o f som e criteria o f value by which to assess them? T h e truth, o f course, is that Nietzsche does indeed sm uggle certain already assum ed values into the concept o f the will to power, in just the circular manner for which he scorns the dewy-eyed naturalists. In a mystificatory gesture quite as deluded as theirs, he naturalizes certain quite specific social values - domination, aggression, exploita­ tion, appropriation - as the very essence o f the universe. But since such relations o f conflict are not a ‘thing’, their essentialism is mystified in its turn. When accused o f subjectivism, Nietzsche can retreat to a kind o f positivism: he is not so m uch promoting any particular values as describing the way life is. Life is callous, wasteful, m erciless, dispassionate, inimical as such to human value; but these term s are o f course thoroughly normative. T rue value is to acknowledge that the amorality o f the competitive life-struggle is the finest thing there is. T h e market place would seem hostile to value o f a traditional spiritual kind; but this plain-minded insistence on certain brute facts o f life is itself, inevitably, a value-judgement. ‘M y idea’, writes Nietzsche, ‘is that each specific body strives to become 251

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m aster over the whole o f space, and to spread out its power - its Willto-Pow er - repelling whatever resists its expansion. But it strikes continually upon a like endeavour o f other bodies, and ends by adjusting itself (“ unifying”) with them.’31 Few more explicit theoriza­ tions o f capitalist competition could be im agined; but N ietzsche is out in his own way to spiritualize this predatory state. T h e will to power may be in one sense philosophical code for the market place, but it also delivers an ‘aristocratic’ rebuke to the sordid instrumentalism o f such struggle, urging instead a vision o f power as an aesthetic delight in Itself. Such an irrationalism o f power, scornful o f all base purpose, dissociates itself from an ignoble utilitarianism in the very act o f reflecting the irrationalism o f capitalist production. How does one come, unlike a Schopenhauer, to ‘choose’ the will to power? Either the act o f choosing to affirm the will is an effect o f the will itself, in which case it is hard to see how it can be a ‘choice’; or it is not, in which case it would seem to fall, impossibly for N ietzsche, outside the will to power’s cosm ic scope. N ietzsche’s own response to this dilem ma is to deconstruct the entire opposition between free will and determinism. In the act o f affirming the will, liberty and necessity blend undecidably together, and the primary Nietzschean im age o f this aporia is the activity o f the artist. Artistic creation is no mere matter o f Volition’ - a metaphysical delusion for Nietzsche if ever there was one; but it figures nonetheless as our finest instance o f emancipation. Indeed art is N ietzsche’s theme from beginning to end, and the will to power is the suprem e artefact.32 T h is is not to say that he places much credence in classical aesthetics: if the world is a work o f art it is not as an organism but as ‘in all eternity chaos - in the sense not o f a lack o f necessity but o f a lack o f order, arrangement, form, beauty, w isdom , and whatever other nam es there are for our aesthetic anthropom orphism s’.33 T h e aesthetic is not a question o f harmonious representation but o f the formless productive energies o f life itself, which spins o ff sheerly provisional unities in its eternal sport with itself. What is aesthetic about the will to power is exactly this groundless, pointless self-generating, the way it determines itself differently at every moment out o f its own sublimely unsearchable depths. T h e universe, N ietzsche comm ents in The Will to Power, is a work o f art which gives birth to itself; and the artist or Übermensch is 252

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one w ho can tap this p ro ce ss in the nam e o f his ow n free se lf­ production. S u c h an aesth etics o f production is the enem y o f all contem plative K an tian taste - o f that disin terested gaze on the reified aesthetic o b je ct w hich su p p re sses the turbulent, tenden tious p ro cess o f its m aking. T h e critical eun uch s m ust thus be overthrown by the virile artistic practitioners. A rt is ecstasy and rapture, dem onic an d delirious, a physiological rath er than spiritual affair. It is a m atter o f supple m u scles and sen sitized nerves, an exquisite toning and refining o f the body which b len d s sen su al intoxication with effortless discipline. N ietzsch e’s id eal artist so u n d s m ore like a co m m an d o than a visionary. Art is sexualized to its root: ‘M akin g m usic is ju st another way o f m ak in g ch ildren .’34 T h e attem pt to ren d er it disin terested is m erely an oth er castratin g fem inine assau lt on the will to pow er, along with scien ce, truth and asceticism . A s H eid eg ger n otes in a shabby little co m m en t: ‘T r u e , N ietzsch e sp eak s against fem inine aesthetics. B u t in doin g so he sp eak s for m asculine aesth etics, hence for aesth etics.’35 T h e overm an is artist and artefact, creature and creator in one, w hich is precisely not to su g g e st that he lets rip his sp on tan eo u s im p u lses. O n the contrary, N ietzsche d en o u n ces the ‘blin d in d ulgen ce o f an affect’ as the cau se o f the greatest evils, and view s g reatn ess o f ch aracter as a m anly control o f the instincts. T h e highest aesthetic condition is self-hegem ony: after the long, degrading labour o f su b m issio n to m oral law, the Übermensch wilt finally attain sovereignty o v e r his now sublim ed appetites, realizin g and reining them in with all the nonchalance o f the superbly confident artist cu ffin g his m aterials into shape. T h e w hole o f existence is accordingly aestheticized; w e m ust be ‘ p oets o f ou r lives’ , N ietzsche proclaim s, in the m inutest everyday m atters.37 T h e overm an im provises his being from m om ent to m om ent out o f a superabun dan ce o f pow er and high spirits, stam p in g form on the flux o f the w orld, forgin g ch aos into fleeting o rd er. ‘T o becom e m aster o f the ch aos one is; to com pel on e’s ch aos to b ecom e form ’ 3* is the highest aesthetic achievem ent, which only th e m ost dedicated sad o-m asoch ist can attain. T h e truly stron g m an is seren e enough to subm it to such laceratin g selfd isciplin e; th ose w ho resen t this constraint are the w eak who fear to becom e slav es. T h e con strain t in q u estion , in fact, is o f an en h an cin g rather than oppressive kind. W hat is at stake, as H eid egger pu ts it, is ‘ not the 253

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m ere subjection o f chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness o f chaos and the primordiality o f law to advance under the sam e yoke, inevitably bound to one another with equal necessity\39 T h e law o f the future human animal is o f a curiously andnomian kind, utterly unique to each individual. N othing outrages N ietzsche more than the insulting suggestion that individuals might be in som e way commensurable. T h e law which the Übermensch confers on himself, like the ‘law’ o f the artefact, is in no sense heteronomous to him, but simply the inner necessity o f his incomparable self-fashioning. T h e aesthetic as model or principle o f social consensus is utterly routed by this radical insistence on autonomy; and it is here, perhaps, that N ietzsche’s thought is at its m ost politically subversive. T h e Übermensch is the enemy o f all established social mores, all proportionate political forms; his delight in danger, risk, perpetual self-reconstitution recalls the ‘crisis* philosophy o f a Kierkegaard, as equally disdainful o f meekly habitual conduct. T h e aesthetic as autonomous self-realization is now at loggerheads with the aesthetic as custom, habitus, social unconscious; or, more precisely, the latter have now been audaciously appropriated from the public domain to the personal life. T h e overman lives from habitual instinct, absolved from the clumsy reckonings o f conscious­ n ess; but what is admirable in him is inauthentic in society as a whole. H egem ony is wrested from the political arena and relocated within each incommensurable subject. Nietzsche’s writings betray a profoundly m asochistic love o f the law, an erotic joy in the severity with which artists o f their own humanity wrench the materials o f their being into burnished form. But the idea o f a law entirely peculiar to the individual simply allows him to reconcile his disgust for morbid selfindulgence with an extreme libertarianism. W e have seen that the moral law for N ietzsche, as with the M osaic code for S t Paul, is merely a ladder to be kicked away once mounted. It form s a protective shelter within which one grows to maturity; but it m ust then be abandoned, in a Kierkegaardian ‘suspension o f the ethical’, for the adventure o f free self-creation. What this enterprise involves is the transmuting into instinct o f all that consciousness has painfully acquired in the epoch when it reigned suprem e. In that period, the human organism learnt to absorb into its structure the ‘untruth* essential for it to flourish; it rem ains to be seen whether it can now in turn incorporate the truth - which is to say, the 254

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recognition that there is no truth. T h e overm an is he who can assim ilate an d naturalize even this terrible know ledge, convert it to finely instinctual habit, dance w ithout certainties on the brink o f the abyss. F o r him , the very gro u n d lessn ess o f the w orld h ad becom e a so u rce o f aesth etic delight and an opportunity for self-invention. In thus living o u t acq u ired cultural values as un con sciou s reflex, the overm an red u p licates at a higher level the barbarian who sim ply un leash ed his drives. In a reversal o f the classic aesthetic project, instinct will now incorporate reason: consciousness, duly ‘aestheticized’ as bodily intuition, will take over the life-sustaining functions once fulfilled by the ‘low er’ drives; and the co n seq u en ce will be that decon struction o f the opposition betw een intellect and instinct, volition and n ecessity, o f which art is the suprem e prototype. ‘ Artists seem to have m o re sensitive n oses in these m atters’, N ietzsch e w rites, ‘know ing only too well that precisely when they no lon ger do anything ‘voluntarily’ bu t do everything o f necessity, their feelin g o f freedom , subtlety', full pow er, o f creative placing, disp osin g, and form ing reach es its p e ak - in short, that necessity and “ freedom o f the w ill” then becom e on e in th em .’40 N ietzsch e’s narrative, then, begin s with an original inerrancy o f blind im pulse, am bivalently adm irable and terrible; sh ifts to a m oral conscien ce w hich im perils but also enriches such im p u lses; and cu lm inates in a higher synthesis in which body and m ind are united un der the a e g is o f the form er. An originary brutal coercion gives birth to an era o f m o ral hegem ony, which in turn paves the w ay for the se lf­ hegem ony o f the overm an. T h is new dispen sation com bines, in tran sfigured form , the spontaneity o f the first period w ith the legality o f the seco n d. A ‘b a d ’ introjection o f the law in the ethical-subjective stage gives w ay to a ‘go o d ’ such internalization in the co m in g aesthetic epoch, w hen freed om and governance will each find its root in the other. F o r su c h a rem orselessly an ti-H egelian thinker as N ietzsche, this scen ario h as som ething o f a fam iliar ring. Its perturbing originality is to p re ss to a third stage the tw o-phase m ovem ent, fam iliar to aesth eticizin g thought, from coercion to hegem ony. T h e concept o f hegem ony is retained; but the law to which on e will finally yield co n sen t is nothing but the law o f on e’s unique bein g. In taking over the aesth etic m odel o f a free appropriation o f law, but in stripping that law o f its uniform ity and universalism , N ietzsch e brings low any notion o f social co n sen su s. ‘ And how sh ould there be a 255

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“com m on go o d ” !’, he sco ffs in Beyond Good and Evil. ‘T h e term co n trad icts itself: w hatever can be com m on always h a s little v a lu e /41 In The Twilight o f the Idols he d ism isses conventional virtue a s little m ore than ‘m im icry’, thus scornfully overturning the whole B urkeian vision o f aesth etic m im esis as the b asis o f social m utuality. A sthetics and p olitics are now outright antagonists: all great p erio d s o f culture have been p erio ds o f political decline, and the w hole concept o f the ‘cu ltu re »state\ o f the aesthetic as civilizing, education al, socially therapeutic, is ju st another dism al em asculation o f art’s sublim ely am oral p ow er.42 N ie tzsc h e ’s aristocratic disdain for a com m on m easu re is by no m ean s w holly unacceptable to bourgeois individualism . B ut it strikes at the root o f conventional order, and so catch es the bourgeoisie on its so rest point o f contradiction betw een its dream o f autonom y and d em an d fo r legality. In the end, N ietzsche is claim ing that the p resen t regim e o f legal and m oral subjecth ood sim ply m ed iates between two states o f anarchy, one ‘barbaric’ and the other ‘artistic’. I f this is hardly g lad tidings for orthodox society, neither is his im pudent severing o f all connection betw een art and truth. I f art is ‘tru e’ for N ietzsch e, it is only b ecau se its illusoriness em b od ies the truth that there is no truth. ‘T ru th is ugly,’ he w rites in The tVitl to Power. ‘We p o sse ss art lest we perish o f the truth.’43 Art ex p re sse s the will to pow er; but the will to pow er is nothing but sem b lan ce, transient ap p earan ce, sen su o u s su rface. L ife itse lf is ‘aesthetic9 becau se it aim s only at ‘sem b lan ce, m eaning, error, deception, sim ulation, delusion, se lf-d e lu sio n ’ ;44 and art is true to this reality precisely in its falsity. It is also false to it, sin ce it im prints an ephem eral stability o f bein g on this m ean in gless w arring o f forces; there is no way in w hich the will to pow er can b e rep resen ted without bein g in that m om en t distorted. Art ex p re sse s the brute sen selessn ess o f the will, b u t sim ultaneously co n ceals th is lack o f m ean in g by the fash ioning o f significant form . In doin g so , it tricks u s into a m om entary b e lie f that the world has som e significant sh ap e to it, and so fulfils som ething o f the function o f the K an tian im aginary. T h e m o re false art is, then, the truer it is to the essen tial falsity o f life; but sin ce art is determinate illusion, it thereby co n ceals the truth o f that falsity.4*5 At a single stroke, art sym ptom atizes and sh ields us from the terrible (un)truth o f the universe, and thus is doubly false. O n the one hand, its consolatory form s protect us from the dreadful 256

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insight that there is actually nothing at all, that the will to power is neither real, true nor self-identical; on the other hand, the very content o f those forms is the will itself, which is no more than an eternal dissembling. Art as dynamic process is true to the untruth o f the will to power; art as product or appearance is untrue to this (un)truth. In artistic creation, then, the will to power is harnessed and turned for an instant against its own cruel indifference. T o produce form s and values from this tumultuous force is in once sense to work against it; but it is to do so with a touch o f its own dispassionate serenity, in the knowledge that all such values are purely fictive. O ne might put the same point differently by claiming that art for Nietzsche is at once masculine and feminine. If it is strenuous, m uscular, productive, it is also fickle, m endacious, seductive. Indeed N ietzsche’s entire philosophy turns on a curious amalgam o f these sexual stereotypes. T h is most outrageously masculinist o f creeds is devoted to hymning the ‘feminine* values o f form, surface, semblance, elusiveness, sensuality, against the patriarchal metaphysics o f essence, truth and identity. In the concept o f the will to power, these two sets o f sexual characteristics are subtly interwoven. T o live according to the will is to live robustly, imperiously, released from all female obeisance to law into splendid phallic autonomy. But to have mastered oneself in this style is to be set free to live mischievously, pleasurably, ironically, luxuriating in a teasing sport o f masks and personae, gliding in and out o f every passion and subject-position with all the serene self­ com posure o f the sage. Nietzsche is thus able to speak up for the ‘feminine’ principle precisely as one o f the m ost virulent sexists o f his age, a title he shares with the obsessively misogynistic Schopenhauer. I f truth is indeed a woman, then the claim is complimentary to neither. In the aftermath o f Fichte and Schelling, Nietzsche is the most flamboyant example we have o f a full-blooded aestheticizer, reducing everything there is - truth, cognition, ethics, reality itself - to a species o f artefact. ‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon, he writes in celebrated phrase, ‘that existence and the world are eternally ju stified '* which means among other things that the blood-sport o f history is at least a sport, which intends no harm because it intends nothing but itself. Thought itself must be aestheticized, shedding its leaden earnestness to become dance, laughter, high spirits. T h e key 257

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ethical term s are noble and base rather than good an d bad, question s o f style an d taste rather than o f m oral judgem en t. R ight living is a m atter o f artistic consistency, ham m ering on e’s existence into an austerely un ified sty le. Art itse lf is blessin g and déification: it m ust be w rested from the m onkish idealists and restored to the body, to orgy and festive ritual. A esthetic value-jud gem en ts m ust rediscover their true foundation in the libidinal drives. Art in stru cts us in the profoun d truth o f how to live superficially, to halt at the sen su ou s su rface rath er than hunt the illusory essence beneath it. Perhaps superficiality is the true essen ce o f life, and depth a m ere veil thrown over the authentic banality o f things. T o claim that there is nothing but surface is to argu e, in effect, that society m u st relinquish its traditional m etaphysical ju stification s for what it d o e s. It is a feature o f the rationalizing, secu larizin g activity o f m id d le-class society, as we have seen already, that it tends to underm ine so m e o f the very m etaphysical values on w hich that society d ep en d s in part for its legitim ation. N ietzsch e’s thought points one bold way o u t o f this em b arrassin g contradiction: society should renounce su c h m etaphysical pieties and live daringly, groundlessly, in the eternal truth o f its m aterial activity'. It is this activity which in the concept o f the will to pow er h as been raised to the aesth etic dignity o f an end in itself. B ou rgeois productive en ergies m ust furnish their own foundation; the values which ratify the social order m u st be conjured directly out o f its own vital forces, out o f the ‘ facts’ o f its incessant striving an d strugglin g, not hypocritically su p e rad d e d from som e sup ern atural source. H istory m u st learn to be self-generative and self-legitim atin g, open its e ars to the hard lesson o f the aesthetic. T h is whole proliferatin g network o f dom inance, aggressiv en ess and appropriation m u st confront the death o f G od and have the courage to be its ow n rationale. T h e death o f G o d is the death o f the su p erstru ctu re; society m u st m ake do instead with the ‘b a se ’ o f its own productive forces, the will to power. View ed in this light, N ietzsch e’s work sign als a legitim ation crisis in which the brute facts o f bourgeois society' are no longer easily ratifiable by an inherited notion o f ‘culture’ . W e m u st tear asid e the ‘m en d acio u s finery o f that alleged reality o f the m an o f cu lture’,47 acknow ledgin g that none o f the social legitim ations on offer K an tian duty, m oral sen se, U tilitarian hedonism an d the rest - are any longer convincing. R ather than search anxiously for som e 258

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alternative m etaphysical guaran tee, we should em b race the will to pow er - w hich is to say, the m etaphysical guarantee that no ultim ate ground is n ee d e d , that violence and dom ination are ju st expressions o f the way the universe is and require no justification beyond this. It is this that N ietzsch e m ean s by living aesthetically, celeb ratin g pow er as an end in itself. B ut this turns out to be sim ply one m ore justification, investing life w ith all the glam our o f the cosm ic ideologies we should su p p osed ly su rp ass. N ietzsch e p its the productive vitality o f social life again st its drive for co n sen su s, thus turning one current o f the aesthetic against another. O n th e one hand, a ram pant aestheticization sw eeps boldly acro ss the w hole o f conventional society, undoing its ethics and epistem ology, sh atterin g its supernatural consolations and scientific totem s, and d em olish in g in its radical individualism all possibility o f stable political order. O n the other hand, this aestheticizin g force can be seen as th e very life-blood o f that conventional society - a s the urge to infinite productivity as an end in itself, with each prod ucer locked in etern al com bat with the others. It is a s though N ietzsche finds in this organ ized social irrationalism som eth in g o f art’s own splendidly autotelic nature. In contem pt for the tim orous bourgeois, he unveils a s his ideal that violently self-w illing creatu re, conjuring h im se lf up an ew at every m om ent, who w as for K ierk egaard the last w ord in ‘ae sth etic’ futility. But this ferocious new creation , stam ping h is overbearin g sh ape on the world with all the hauteur o f the old tran scen den tal ego , is hardly a s new as he appears. I f the furious dynam ism o f the Übermensch terrifies the stout m etaphysical citizen, he m ay also figure as his fantastic alter ego, in the sphere o f production if not in the sacrcd precincts o f family, church and state. T o live adventurously, experim entally, may jeopardize m etaphysical certi­ tu d es; but su c h resourcefu l self-im provization is hardly an unfam iliar life-style in the m arket place. N ietzsche is an astonishingly radical thinker, w ho h ack s his way through the superstructure to leave hardly a strut o f it stan d in g. A s far as the b ase goes, his radicalism leaves everything exactly as it w as, only a good deal m ore so. Notes 1 Friedrich N ietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), p. 35.

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2 Ibid., p. 18. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J . Hollingdalc (New York, 1968), p. 270. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Basic Writings o f Nietzsche (New York, 1968), p. 307. Hereafter BW. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy o f Morals, BW, pp. 550 and 498. 6 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, BW p. 290. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, AH Too Human, quoted by Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), p. 429. 8 Nietzsche, Genealogy o f Morals, BW, p. 521. 9 Ibid., pp. 5 2 2 -3 . 10 Ibid., p. 523. 11 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 404. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, quoted by Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 370. 13 The Gay Science, quoted by Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 190. 14 Fricdrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by A. M. Ludovici (London, 1927), p. 34. 15 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 315. 16 Nietzsche, Genealogy o f Morals, BW p. 557. 17 Ibid. 18 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, BW p. 393. 19 Nietzsche, Genealogy o f Morals, BW p. 532. 20 Ibid., p. 265. 21 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 269. 22 Jurgen Haberm as, Knowledge and Human Interests (London, 1987), p. 299. 23 Gilles Dclcuzc, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London, 198-3), pp. 8 5 -6 . 24 Nietzsche, The Twilight o f the Idols, p. 87. 25 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, BW p. 205. 26 Nietzsche, I he Gay Science, p. 286; The Twilight o f the Idols, p. 75. 27 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, BW p. 291. 28 Ibid., p. 326. 29 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 433. 30 Martin I Icidcggcr, Nietzsche, vol. 1 : Ihe Will to Power as Art (London, 1981), p. 127. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlass, quoted by Arthur C . Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1965), p. 220. 32 For an interesting treatment o f literary and artistic motifs in Nietzsche, see Alexander Ncham as, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cam bridge, M ass., 1985). S e c also Allan Megill, Prophets o f Extremity (Berkeley, 1985), Part 1.

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Nietzsche, Genealogy o f Morals, BW p. 521. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 421. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 76. Nietzsche, The Will to Power\ p. 490. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, quoted Danto, p. 147. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 444. Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 128. Nietzsche, BW p. 196. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, BW p. 330. Nietzsche, BW p. 243. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 435. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 282. S ee Pierre Macherey, A Theory o f Literary Production (London, 1978), Part 1, for an interestingly parallel approach. See also Paul de M an’s account of The Birth o f Tragedy in Allegories o f Reading (New Haven, 1979). 46 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, BW p. 132. 47 Ibid., p. 61.

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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The N am e o f the Father: Sigmund Freud I f the aesthetic informs som e o f K arl M arx’s m ost central political and economic categories, it also infiltrates the psychoanalytical doctrines o f Sigm und Freud. Pleasure, play, dream, myth, scene, sym bol, fantasy, representation: these are no longer to be conceived o f as supplementary matters, aesthetic adornm ents to the proper bu sin ess o f life, but as lying at the very root o f human existence, as what C harles Levin has called ‘a kind o f primitive substance o f social process’.1 Hum an life is aesthetic for Freud in so far as it is all about intense bodily sensations and baroque imaginings, inherently significatory and symbolic, inseparable from figure and fantasy. T h e unconscious works by a kind o f ‘aesthetic’ logic, condensing and displacing its im ages with the crafty opportunism o f an artistic bricoleur. Art for Freud is thus no privileged realm, but is continuous with the libidinal processes which go to make up daily life. I f it is som ehow peculiar, it is only because that daily life is itself exceedingly strange. I f the aesthetic has been prom oted in idealist circles as a form o f sensuousness without desire, F reu d will unmask the pious naivety o f this view as itself a libidinal yearning. T h e aesthetic is what we live by; but for a Freud as opposed to a Schiller, this is at least as m uch catastrophe as triumph. N ietzsche anticipated F reu d ’s demystifying o f aesthetic disinter­ estedn ess; but in one important respect F reu d presses beyond the N ietzsche who so strikingly prefigures his thought. N ietzsche’s will to pow er is unequivocally positive, and the artefacts which express it are resonant with such affirmation. It is this virile vitality, this phallic repletion, which psychoanalysis will undercut with the concept o f

TH E NAME OF THE FATHER

desire. D esire insinuates a lack at the very heart o f this Nietzschean robustness, slides into the will a negativity or perversity which renders it non-identical with itself. O ur powers have something eternally dissatisfied about them, a motility and indeterminacy which causes them to m iss the mark, go awry*, swerve back upon themselves; there is a subtle flaw at the centre o f power which casts a shadow over N ietzsche’s repressive drive for health, sanity, integrity. It is because our bodies are not gloriously autonom ous, as Nietzsche tends to im agine them, but bound up in their evolution with the bodies o f others, that this treacherous faltering or deviating o f our im pulses com es about. If Nietzschean power plum ps the body full, Freudian desire hollows it out. And this will have its effects on our view o f the aesthetic artefact, which for all Freud’s own somewhat traditionalist aesthetic notions can no longer dupe us a s integral, well-rounded, symmetrical. Such an artefact is a covert trope o f the humanist subject, which after Freud can never be the sam e again. What he implicitly interrogates is the whole classical aesthetic heritage, from G oethe and Schiller to M arx and M atthew Arnold, o f the rich, potent, serenely balanced su b je ct O n the contrary, Freud argues, our drives are in contradiction with one another, our faculties in a state o f perm anent warfare, our fulfilments fleeting and tainted. T h e aesthetic may be, for Freud as much as for Schiller, an imaginary consolation, but it is also the detonator o f profound discharges which unm ask the human subject as fissured and unfinished. T h e humanist dream o f fullness is itself a libidinal fantasy, as indeed is the whole o f traditional aesthetics. What that aesthetics yearns for is an object at once sensuous and rule-bound, a body which is also a mind, com bining all the delicious plenitude o f the senses with the authority o f an abstract decree. It is therefore a fantasy o f mother and father in one, o f love and law commingled, an imaginary space in which pleasure-principle and reality-principle fuse under the aegis o f the form er. T o becom e at one with the aesthetic representation is to recover for a treasured moment that primary narcissistic condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be riven apart. Freud acknowledges in Civilisation and its Discontents that psychoanalysis has had hardly anything significant to say about aesthetic beauty, its nature and origin; but he is certain (as how would he not be?) that it derives from ‘the field o f sexual feeling*, as a libidinal impulse inhibited in its aim, and concludes his somewhat bem used reflections 263

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with a lam e com m ent on the unaesthetic ap p earan ce o f the male genitals.2 T o relate a Beethoven son ata to the testicles is hardly in the style o f traditional aesth etics. F reu d savagely dem ystifies culture, tracking its m urky ro o ts to the re cesse s o f the unconscious a s relentlessly as M arxism d isc lo se s its concealed source in historical barbarism . Art is infantile and regressive, a non-neurotic form o f substitute satisfaction; incapable o f aban don in g a p leasurable object, m en an d w om en shift from toying with their faeces to tinkering with trom bon es. W orks o f art resem ble dream s less than they d o jokes, and the closest thing to the su b lim e for F reu d is the ridiculous. In a b r ie f p ap er entitled ‘ H u m o u r’, h e regard s hum our as a kind o f trium ph o f n arcissism , w hereby the ego refu ses to be distressed by the provocations o f reality in a victorious assertion o f its invulnerability. H u m ou r tran sm utes a threatening w orld into an occasion for pleasure; and to this extent it resem bles n oth ing as m uch as the classical sublim e, which sim ilarly perm its u s to reap gratification from our se n ses o f im perviousn ess to the terrors aroun d us. T h e highest has its base in the low est, in a gesture o f Bakhtinian reversal which shatters the lying preten sion s o f cultural idealism . T h a t m ost lofty o f all R om antic categories - vision lies em barrassin gly close to those lowly libidinal su b -tex ts we call d ream s. Id ealist culture sp eaks the body, but rarely sp eaks of it, unable as it is to round upon its own enabling conditions. F'reud will assail this n oble lie in his gravely scientific, em inently respectable m ien, leaving the outraged bourgeois to dism iss him a s no m ore than a crude reduction ist. I f this is so, then it is puzzling why Freu d h im se lf w as s o d eep in traditional culture, so edified an d enthralled by it. O r at least it is puzzling to those w ho have not taken the point o f W illiam E m p so n ’s w ise pastoral faith that ‘ the m ost refined d esires are inherent in the plainest, and would be false i f they weren’t.'* W henever anyone sp eak s ‘badly but not ill’ of hum an bein gs, rem arks N ietzsch e, defin in g them a s a belly with two n eeds an d a head with one, then ‘the lover o f know ledge should listen carefully and with diligen ce’.4 F re u d ’s oth er im plicit assau lt on traditional aesth etics is to deconstruct its crucial opposition betw een ‘cu lture’ an d ‘civil society’. Scan d alou sly, he refu ses to differentiate culture and civilization, the sph ere o f value and the realm o f appetite. T h e re is no utilitarian sph ere w hich is innocent o f the libidinal, a s there is no cultural 264

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value absolved from the aggressive drives by which civilization is constructed. T h e bourgeois rests satisfied in his puritan belief that pleasure is one thing and reality another; but Freud will com e to deconstruct the opposition between these two mighty principles, viewing the reality principle simply as a kind o f detour or cunning zig­ z ag by which the pleasure principle com es to achieve its goals. A whole set o f distinctions vital to bourgeois ideology - between enterprise and enjoyment, the practical and the pleasurable, sexual and com m ercial intercourse - are accordingly dismantled. T h e traditional aesthetic ideal is one o f a unity o f spirit and sense, reason and spontaneity. T h e body, as we have seen, m ust be judiciously reinserted into a rational discourse which might otherwise wither into despotism ; but this operation m ust be carried out with a minim um o f disruption to that discourse itself. For such conventional aesthetic theory, Freud is exceedingly bad news. F o r his lesson is that the body is never quite at home in language, will never quite recover from its traumatic insertion into it, escaping whole and entire from the mark o f the signifier. Culture and the body meet only to conflict; the scars which we bear are the traces o f our bruising inruption into the symbolic order. Psychoanalysis examines what takes place when desire is given tongue, comes to speech; but speech and desire can never consort amicably together, as m eaning and being continually displace one another; and if language, broadly conceived, is what opens up desire in the first place, desire is also what can bring it to stam m er and fail. I f this is true o f human subjects, it is equally true o f the discourse o f psychoanalysis itself, dealing as it does with forces which threaten to play havoc with its own theoretical coherence. D esire is itself sublim e, finally defeating all representation: there is a substrate in the unconscious which cannot be symbolized, even if it is in som e sense turned towards language, strives for expression, from the outset. It is precisely at this juncture, between m ute force and articulate meaning, that Freudianism installs its enquiry. It is bom as a discourse at the busy cross-roads between the semantic and somatic, and explores their strange inversions: organ as signifier, signifier as material practice. M eanings for Freud are certainly meanings, not the m ere imprint or reflex o f the drives; but once this whole textual process is so to speak flipped over, viewed through a different optic, it can be read as nothing less than a mighty warring o f somatic forces, a 265

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sem an tic field in which the body ach ieves, o r fails to achieve, speech . T h e F re u d ia n drives lie som ew h ere on the frontier betw een the m en tal an d the co rp oreal, represen tin g the body to the m ind; w here we have a drive, there we have a dem an d p laced on the m ind by virtue o f its co n n ection with the body. T o claim th at we ‘ have an u n co n sc io u s’ is not to d esign ate a hidden area o f th e self, like an invisible kidney or ghostly p an creas, but to sp eak o f the way our c o n sc io u sn e ss is distorted from the inside by the exaction s o f the body upon it. T h is b o d y , how ever, is always for F re u d a fictional representation rather than a brute m aterial fact. O nly by an intervening rep resen ta­ tion can th e drives p resen t th em selves to c o n scio u sn e ss, and even in the u n co n sc io u s an instinct m ust be represen ted by a n idea. T o hold with F re u d that the ego is essentially a bodily ego is to claim it a s a kind o f a rtefact, a figurative projection o f the body, a p sych ic m im esis o f its su rfa c e s. T h e ego is a kind o f shadow y inner scree n which plays the n ew sreeJ o f the bod y’s com plex history, its stored sen sory con tacts and m ultiple d ealin gs with the world. F re u d anch ors the m ind in the body, view in g reason a s foun ded in d esire and thinking a s entw ined with w ish in g; but this is not to see these things as the m ere effluxes o f som eth in g u n im peach ab ly solid. F o r that ‘solidity’ is itse lf a psychic co n stru ct, a s the ego b u ild s up an im age o f the body ‘ afte r the event’, so to sp eak , re a d in g it within a sym bolic sch em a a s a co m p lex o f n eed s an d im peratives, rath er than sim ply ‘ reflecting’ it. T h e relation betw een e g o an d body to that extent resem b les the A lthusserian relation betw een theory an d history, a s F re d ric Ja m e so n h as d escrib ed it: sin ce fo r A lth u sser real historical time is only indirectly a c c e ssib le to u s, action for him w ould seem to b e a kind o f blin d foJded operation , a m anipulation at d istan ce, in which we co u ld at b e st watch o u r own perform an ce indirectly, as though in a m irror, read in g it b ack from th e various re ad ju stm en ts o f co n scio u sn e ss which result from the alteration in the external situation itself.5 I f the m ale ch ild ‘ re a d s’ the fem ale body as lacking, it is a reading lau nch ed w ithin the law o f castration , u n d er the aeg is o f the signifier, not sim ply an em pirical percep tion . T o an ch or the m in d in the body is

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thus to lend it no secure foundation: indeed there is som ething elusive and un beatable about the body which, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, makes it the m ost appropriate im age o f the unconscious: When asked how it is possible for a meaning to exist without being conscious, the phenomenologist replies: its m ode o f being is that o f the body, which is neither ego nor thing o f the world. T h e phenomenologist is not saying that the Freudian unconscious is the body; he is simply saying that the m ode o f being o f the body, neither representation in me nor thing outside o f me, is the ontic m odel for any conceivable unconscious.6 It would be a mistake to equate the ego with the subject, since the drives - as in narcissism or m asochism - can just as easily veer round upon it to make it their object. T h e drives are not in phenomenological parlance 'intentional*, defined by their object; objects for Freud are contingent and exchangeable, mere ephemeral targets for instincts whose aim predom inates over their end. Subject and object, as for Nietzsche, are passing products o f the play o f the drives; and what opens up the subject/object duality in the first place is the deeper dialectic o f pleasure and unpleasure, introjection and expulsion, as the ego separates certain bits o f the world from itself and m asticates certain others, thus building up those primordial identifications o f which it is a kind o f storehouse or cemetery. I f this is so, then Freud like Nietzsche deconstructs at a stroke the whole problem atic within which traditional aesthetics moves - that o f the encounter between self-identical subject and stable object, whose m utual estrangem ent may be wondrously transcended in the act o f taste. It is not a question o f rescuing the subject for a precious m om ent from its alienation; to be a subject is to be alienated anyway, rendered eccentric to on eself by the movement o f desire. And if objects matter at all, they matter precisely in the place where they are a b se n t T h e desired object, as Ju liet M itchell has argued in Lacanian vein, com es into existence as an object only when it is lost to the baby or infant.7 It is when that object is removed or prohibited that it lays down the trace o f desire, so that its secure possession will always move under the sign o f loss, its presence w aiped and overshadowed by the perpetual possibility o f its absence- It is just this unnerving

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vacuity at the heart o f the object, this perm anent estrangeability which perm eates its every aspect, which the classical aesthetic representation is out to repress in its fetishized organicism. F re u d 's thought, then, is in one sense wholly ‘aesthetic’, all to do with the theatre o f sensational life. I f it is the motions o f pleasure and unpleasure which bring an objective world about in the first place, then all o f our non-aesthetic relations with that world will continue to be saturated with this originary hedonism. Y et this hedonism, bound up as it is with egoism and m urderous aggressivity, has lost all o f the innocuousness o f classical aesthetic pleasure, which was a respite from such base im pulses rather than a product o f them. Freud returns to this harmlessly defused pleasure its harsh unpleasurability, its rancour, sadism and malice, its negativity and perversity. T h e aesthetic attitude, he believes, may com pensate for the sufferings o f existence, but cannot protect u s from them ; if the aesthetic is conceived o f as plenitude and equipoise, as a wealth o f fulfilled pow ers, then few thinkers since Jonathan Sw ift have been more sceptical o f such an ideal. T h e pleasure principle dom inates the m ental apparatus from start to finish, and yet is at loggerheads with the whole world; there is not the least possibility o f its program m e bein g carried through, for the intention that humanity should be happy was omitted from the plan o f creation. F reu d’s bleak H obbesian view o f human society forbids him from envisaging it as a potentially nourishing space, or from imagining morality as em ancip­ atory rather than oppressive; and he is thus as far as H obbes h im self from the vision o f a Shaftesbury, Schiller o r M arx, o f a social order in which the realization o f human capacities could becom e a delightful end in itself. In this sense he is a radical anti-aesthetician, with scant sympathy, in the words o f Paul Ricoeur, ‘for what might be described as an esthetic world view'.8 O r perhaps it m ight be more accurate to characterize F reu d as a thinker who, while inheriting som ething o f that great tide o f aestheticizing thought which we have followed throughout the nineteenth century, receives this legacy in deeply pessim istic spirit, as a heritage gone sour. T h e re can be no returning to purely rationalist concepts, for the aesthetic has done its subversive w ork; but there can be little hope or joy in this aestheticizing alternative either, for a Freu d as opposed to a N ietzsche or a H eidegger. I f Freud remains a rationalist, though like Sw ift one with a profound suspicion o f reason, it is am ong other reasons because he

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is dry-eyed and hard-headed enough to acknowledge the odious corollaries o f that heady celebration o f instinct, intuition and spontaneity o f which the aestheticizing lineage, at its m ost callow, m ust stand convicted. It was, indeed, one particular historical term inus o f such thought which drove him into exile. T h e re is a story, which Freud might have appreciated, o f M oses descen din g M ount Sin ai with the tablets o f the law under his arm. T v e got them down to ten’, he shouts to the assem bled Israelites, ‘but adultery’s still in.’ F reu d regarded the law as one o f his oldest enem ies, and much o f his therapeutic project is devoted towards tempering its sadistic brutality, which plunges men and women Into m adness and despair. T h e law for Freud is not o f course only an enemy, since in his view to fall outside its sway is to fall sick; but it h as an intemperate violence that m ust be countered. T h is law or superego, on at least one o f F re u d ’s accounts, is simply a differentiation o f the id, whereby som e o f the voracious energy o f the latter is channelled and diverted into a rem orseless violence against the ego. T h e superego has its origin in what Freud describes in The Ego and the Id a s an individual’s first and m ost important identification, that with the father o f his or her own personal prehistory.9 As a result o f this identification, which is prior to any object-cathexis, one part o f the ego is set over against the other, to becom e moral ideal, voice o f conscience and censorious judge. T h e sup erego is b o m o f a splitting o f the ego induced by the action o f the id upon it. As an internalization o f the parental prohibition, the superego is the heir to the O edipus complex, a kind o f hangover o f this lurid dram a; indeed it plays a decisive role in the repression o f the com plex, as the male child’s hostility to the father m odulates into an identification with his symbolic role. T h e superego is thus a residue o f the earliest object-choices o f the id; bu t it also represents what F reu d calls an ‘energetic réaction-formation* against those choices, and so springs to birth under the sign o f contradiction. Exhorting the child to be like its father on the one hand, it bans it from som e o f the father’s m ost enviable activities on the other. T h e superego is thus a kind o f aporia or impossibility, a conundrum or double-bind whose com m andm ents are incapable o f being obeyed.10 Since it is the heir to the O edipus complex, it is therefore, as Freud argues, ‘also the expression o f the m ost powerful im pulses and m ost important

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libidinal vicissitudes o f the id*,11 closer to the unconscious than is the ego. In the act o f m astering the O edipus complex, then, the ego succeed s in handing itself submissively over to the id, or more exactly to that representative o f the id which the superego signifies. A ll o f this lends the law a frightening power. T h e superego is as forceful as it is because it is the consequence o f the first identification, which took place when the ego itself was still feeble; and because it springs out o f the O edipus complex it ‘has thus introduced the m ost m om entous objects into the ego*.12 It is the source o f all idealism, but also o f all our guilt; it is at once high priest and police agent, positive and negative, the image o f the desirable and the promulgator o f taboos and prohibitions. As the voice o f conscience it has its root in the castration threat, and is responsible for all our self-odium and self-scourging, o f which Freud drily remarks that the ‘normal man* is not only far more immoral, but far more moral, than he knows. T h is inexorable law directs what Freud calls an ‘extraordinary harshness and severity’ upon the timorous ego, raging against it with m erciless violence; and in the condition o f melancholia, or acute depression, this violence can result in the ego’s extinction by suicide.13 It is in these circum stances in particular that som e o f the ferocious energy o f the superego can be unmasked for what it is - as nothing less, so F reu d comments, than ‘a pure culture o f the death instinct’ , which it h as caught up and turned to its own predatory purposes. T h e superego is not only self-contradictory, but in a certain sense self-undoing. Freud posits in human beings both a primary narcissism and a primary aggressiveness; and the construction o f civilization involves a sublimation o f both, directing them outwards to higher goals. Part o f our primary aggressiveness is thus diverted from the ego and fused with Eros, builder o f cities, to dominate Nature and create a culture. T h e death drive, which lurks within our aggressivity, is thus tricked out o f its nefarious intentions and harnessed to the business o f establishing a social order. But this social order inevitably entails a renunciation o f instinctual gratification; so that part o f our aggressive­ n ess is driven back upon the ego to becom e the agency o f the superego, source o f the law, morality and idealism essential to the operations o f society. T h e paradox, then, is that the m ore civilized we becom e, the m ore we tear ourselves apart with guilt and internal aggression. Every renunciation o f instinctual satisfaction strengthens the authority o f the superego, intensifies its brutality and so deepens

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ou r guilt. T h e m ore admirably idealist we grow, the more we stoke up within ourselves a culture o f lethal self-hatred. M oreover, the more we direct outwards part o f our narcissistic libido for the construction o f civilization, the m ore depleted we leave its internal resources, to becom e a prey to E m 's old antagonist, Thanatos or the death drive. Identification with the father involves a sublimation, and so a desexualization, o f our erotic drives, which in Freu d’s stringent econom y o f the unconscious leaves them fatally defused and so all the le ss capable o f holding out against their great antagonist. It is in this sense that civilization for Freud is peculiarly selfthwarting. T h e superego is a deeply ambivalent formation, at once expressive o f the id and a réaction-form ation against it, deriving from the energy o f the O edipus complex yet turning back repressively against it. In a grim irony, it harnesses som ething o f the id’s own rabidly am oral forces to a cam paign for social idealism and moral purity. T o fight the id, to repress instinct, is to becom e all the more vulnerable to its destructiveness in a different guise; so that the ego is caugh t up from the outset in som ething o f a m ug’s gam e, hedged round on all sides by mortal enem ies, pulling o ff what poor bargains it can between them. T h e internal complexity o f the superego, however, extends further still. F o r if it is at one level the product o f an introjected external authority, it is at another level caught up with the ego ’s own primary aggressiveness towards itself - with that lethal m asochism which Freud cam e to see in his later work as more fundam ental than sadism . A s Freud puts it: ‘T h e sadism o f the super­ ego and the m asochism o f the ego supplem ent each other and unite to produce the sam e effects.’14 I f the superego is thus a peculiarly overdeterm ined phenomenon, it is so in another sense too. F o r the hostility which it unleashes upon the ego is at once that o f the introjected parental function, and the child’s own aggressive reaction to this agency. It is as though the child hijacks som ething o f die parent’s severity, fuses it with its own hostile reaction to such h arshness, and turns both against its own ego. As L e o Bersani has put it: ‘ T h e child will ingeniously identify with that [parental] authority, n ot in order to continue its punishm ents internally, but rather in o rder to safely possess it, on the inside, as the object o r victim o f its own aggressive im pulses.’ 15 T h e superego, in short, has all the vengefulness which the child would like to direct against the punitive father; ‘the curbing o f aggressiveness’, as B ersan i com m ents, ‘offers

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the only realistic strategy for satisfying aggressiveness.’ 16 T h e superego thus represents a kind o f contradiction between past and present, infantilism and maturity: at the very moment that it shows us the path towards an ideal humanity, it pulls us inexorably back into childhood. ‘Through the institutionalisation o f the superego’, writes N orm an O . Brown, ‘the parents are internalised and man finally succeed s in becom ing father o f himself, bu t at the cost o f becom ing his own child and keeping his ego infantile.’ 17 F re u d ’s most subversive move, throughout the whole o f this discourse, is to reveal the law itself as grounded in desire. T h e law is no more than a modality or differentiation o f the id; and it can therefore no longer be a matter, as with traditional idealist thought, o f envisaging a transcendental order o f authority unscathed by libidinal im pulse. On the contrary, this eminently rational power stands unm asked in F reu d ’s writing as irrational to the point o f insanity - as cruel, vengeful, vindictive, m alicious, vain and paranoid in its authority, madly excessive in its tyrannical dem ands. Like the political state in the eyes o f M arxism , the law would appear augustly transcendental but is in fact the sublimation o f appetite, ‘interested’ to its roots while preserving a facade o f impartial judiciousness. It is void o f all realism, obtusely blind to what the ego might reasonably endure and what injunctions are simply beyond its fragile powers. ‘K ant’, writes Paul Ricoeur, ‘spoke o f the pathology o f desire; Freud speaks o f the pathology o f duty.’ 18 Indeed Freud rem arks explicitly in ‘T h e Econom ic Problem o f M asochism ’ that the Kantian categorical imperative is the direct heir o f the O edipus complex. T h e law is a form o f high-minded terrorism, which like the M osaic code in the judgem ent o f S t Paul will merely illuminate how far short o f it we have fallen, instruct us in what to avoid but give us no pedagogical aid in how to achieve the ideals it brandishes before us. As far as the prohibitory aspects o f the superego are concerned, Freud would no doubt have sympathized with W. H . A uden’s crack about the u selessn ess o f a moral law which simply observes human nature and then inserts a ‘N ot’ . M orality as we have it is a condition o f permanent self-alienation; every human subject is colonized by a foreign m aster, a fifth columnist within the self. T h e Freudian superego thus corresponds to that form o f political coercion which we have contrasted in this study with the concept o f hegemony. It represents that absolutist, crudely uneducative Reason

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which for a Schiller was in dire need o f som e sensuous tempering. It is a form o f political power appropriate to the ancien regime, an im perious ruler with no regard to the feelings and capacities o f his subjects. T h e superego, as Freud rem arks, ‘does not trouble itself enough about the facts o f the mental constitution o f human beings. It issu es a comm and and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it.*19 It has all the arrogance o f power but none o f its craftiness, bereft o f all strategic sense and psychological insight. T h e question, then, is how this uncouth despotism is to become hegem onized; and we shall see in a m om ent what answer Freud gives to this problem. M eanwhile, it is worth noting that the fact that power has its basis in desire delivers an ambivalent political m essage. T h ere is no doubt, to begin with, that it is this which renders the Freudian law as potent as it is. O ne reason why repressive political regimes are as tenacious and refractory as they are would be in F re u d ’s view because they are secretly fuelled by implacable desire, characterized by all the purblind recalcitrance o f the unconscious. And this is doubtless one reason am ong several why they are so difficult to dislodge. A power structure held together by nothing but rational consensus or conscious manipulation would be far easier to topple. I f Freud is to be believed, late capitalist society sustains its rule not only by police forces and ideological apparatuses, but by raiding the resources o f the death drive, the O edipus complex and primary aggressivity. On this theory, it is because such regim es are able to tap into the very energies involved in the turbulent constitution o f the human subject that they appear at tim es to have all the obdurate resistance to upheaval o f a mountain range. T h e forces which sustain authority, in short, are compulsive and pathological, and will resist transformation as stubbornly as an analysand will repeat rather than remember. Civilization reproduces itself by cornering the currents o f the id in order to outflank it, flexing those drives back upon themselves through the relay o f a portion o f the ego in a repression eveiy bit as intem perate as the life o f the unconscious itself. T h a t desire and the law are bedfellows a s much as sworn foes can be formulated in a num ber o f ways. T h e law, as we have seen, is itself desirous; it was through the law, in the shape o f the originary prohibition, that desire cam e into the world; and it is in the nature o f taboos to intensify the longings they forbid, exciting the very

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co n cu p isce n ce they frown on. T h is recognition, o f the m utual im brication o f law an d d e sire , h as served in o u r own tim e to licen se a certain fash ion ab le political p essim ism ; and it is su rely true that no m ere e x p re ssio n /re p re ssio n m odel, o f the kind ad o p ted at least in p art by M a rx , can survive the F re u d ian account u n scath ed . I f the law and d e sire are bo rn at a stroke, then there can be no q uestion o f p ositin g an intrinsically creative d esire which is m erely stifled in its e x p re ssiv e n e ss by a recalcitrant external pow er. B u t it is also possible to view this grim con dition from another angle. I f the law really were tran scen d en tal!}' d isin terested , then the political left w ould m ost certainly be in trouble. T h a t the law is not, ideologically speakin g, how it w ou ld like to p rese n t itse lf is at on ce p olitical o b stacle and opportunity . I f its g ro u n d in g in d esire is w hat d e ep e n s its virulence, it is also w hat re n d e rs it p recario u s and problem atic, a s a genuinely tran scen d en tal authority w ould not be. M ark ed by the sig n o f castration , co n cea lin g its lack beneath its logocen trism , the law has som eth in g o f the instability' o f the un co n sciou s a s well a s o f its d riven n ess. T h e very e x c e ss o f its zeal is the chink in its arm o u r - not only b e c a u s e it sign ifies the brash authoritarianism o f the in secure, bu t b e ca u se it involves the law in a ce a se le ss self-u n d o in g , arou sin g the yearn in gs it in terd icts, sp re ad in g havoc in the n am e o f creatin g o rd er. T h e law is out o f han d, an d i f its d e c re e s becom e in su p p ortab le then it leaves its victim s with no ch oice but to fall ill o f n eu ro sis o r to rebel. B oth c o u rse s o f action have th eir am b igu o u s pain s an d p le a su re s. It w as su ch rebellion which F re u d had in m ind w hen he w rote in The Future o f an Illusion that if a society fails to develop b ey o n d the point w here the satisfaction o f a minority' d e p en d s upon the su p p re ssio n o f the m ajority, it ‘ neither h as n o r d e se rv e s the p ro sp ect o f a lastin g e xisten ce’.20 In such con dition s, F re u d a d d s, one can n ot e x p e c t an internalization o f cultural proh ib ition s to take p lace am o n g the o p p re sse d - w hich is to say that political pow er w ould ce a se to be h egem o n ic. I f there is am bivalence in the law, a sim ilar d o u b le n c ss can be seen to lie on the sid e o f th ose who lan guish beneath its sway. T h e real enem y o f th e political radical is less the m eg a-d o llar than m asoch ism - the co n d ition in which we com e to love an d d esire the law itself. I f the su p e re g o ste m s from an introjection o f the fath er, then it b ears within it the ch ild ’s love for that fath er a s m uch a s its enmity'. F re u d co n n ects the e g o ’s d e sire for pun ish m en t with the w ish to be beaten

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by the father,21 an ‘erotogenic* m asochism which joins with our ‘m oral* m asochism . T h is psychical state is as deep-seated as it is because tenderness and respect for authority are part o f the earliest m anifestations o f love, prior to the em ergence o f sexuality itself. ‘By nature (that is, originally)’, writes Philip R ieff, ‘love is authoritarian; sexuality - like liberty - is a later achievement, always in danger o f bein g overwhelmed by our deeper inclinations towards subm issive­ n e ss and dom ination.’22 Indeed L eo Bersan i goes so far as to find in m asochism the very ‘essence’ o f sexuality, whose well-nigh shattering effects on the ego would be unendurable without such perverse gratification.23Je a n Laplanche, similarly, speaks o f ‘the privileged role o f m asochism in human sexuality’.24 Yet there is no love without ambivalence, and this respect for privileged figures is opposed in the unconscious by intensely hostile feelings towards them. O ur sense o f dependency on others, after all, is bound to wound our narcissistic fantasies o f omnipotence, the consoling creed that we sprang fully fledged from our own loins. I f the se lf craves its own confinement, then, it also reaps delight from seeing its gaolers brought low - even if the result o f this, in an unceasing dialectic, is guilt, further subm issiveness, and yet more pleasure in dethroning the despot. T h e Freudian conception o f law and desire would thus seem to defeat traditional political notions o f coercion and hegemony. A s a kind o f absolutist monarch, the tyrannical superego is so cruelly unrelenting that one would expect it inevitably to instigate revolt. But what m akes it as implacable as it is - its intimacy with the id - is exactly what binds us libidinally to it, thus tightening its grip. In a striking paradox, what sustains the law’s coerciveness is exacdy what secu res its hegemony. A s Freud argues about social conflict, ‘the sup p ressed classes can be emotionally attached to their m asters; in spite o f their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; un less such relations o f a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it w ould be im possible to understand how a num ber o f civilizations have survived so long in spite o f the justifiable hostility o f large human m asses.’25 T h e transition which Freud oudines, from an external parental agency to that introjection o f it which is the superego, is parallel to the political shift from absolutism to hegemony, where the latter is understood as an internalization o f the law as the principle o f on e’s own being. Yet in F reu d ’s scenario this transition would hardly seem to tem per the law’s rigours at all; on the contrary, as he remarks

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in Civilisation and its Discontents, it ushers in a state o f ‘permanent internal unhappiness’, as we eagerly collude in our own misery. We renounce a heteronomous authority for fear o f its violence; but we then install it securely inside us, and renounce instinctual gratification for fear o f it. In one sense, this signifies an even deeper subjection; for this internal conscience, unlike the actual father, is omniscient, knows ou r faintest unconscious wishes, and will discipline us for these as well as for our actual conduct. M oreover, unlike any reasonable father, it punishes us the more we obey it. I f we refrain from aggression, it simply takes over this bit o f unacted violence and turns it against us. W e do indeed, in hegemonic fashion, take pleasure in the law; but this deepens its despotism rather than renders its burdens sweet. In Totem and Taboo, Freud offers a phylogenetic account o f the transition from coercion to hegemony, to match this ontogenetic one. Civilization cannot be properly founded until the arbitrary will o f the patriarchal despot is curtailed; and this is achieved by his death at the hands o f the tribal horde o f sons, who give the law to themselves and thus establish the bonds o f community. Coercion remains, both in the form o f the internalized dead father and in the necessity o f work; all societies, Freud comm ents in M arxian vein, have at root an economic motive.26 But if one o f the ruling forces o f social life is Ananke (necessity or coercion), the other is E m s which is a matter o f hegemony. Eros acts as the cement o f social relations, rendering them libidinally gratifying and so providing the ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to the objectively material foundation o f social unity. Civilization, Freud writes, aim s at binding the m em bers o f the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every m eans to that end. It favours every path by which strong identifica­ tions can be established between the members o f the community, and so it sum mons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bonds by relations o f friendship. In order for these aim s to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable.27 I f this is what sustains society, however, it is also the nub o f the problem . F o r sexual desire and aggressiveness will conflict with these

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social goals; civilization will threaten love; and the more Eros is sublim ated to these worthy ends, the more vulnerable it becom es to Thanatos. Only a minority o f men and women will be capable o f effective sublimation; the m asses, for Freu d as for Burke, must make do with the coerced sublimation o f manual work, which is never very effective. Sublim ination would seem the only path by which the claim s o f the ego can be met without repression - but it is a precarious, unsatisfactory affair. T h e process o f hegemony, in short, is both partial and self-undoing: what holds society together is just what is in danger o f tearing it apart. Conventional aesthetic thought, as we have seen, imagines the introjection o f a transcendental law by the desiring subject. F reu d’s doctrine, however, deeply complicates this paradigm : for both terms in the equation are now divided, am biguous, unstable, mutually parasitic. It is no longer a question o f imprinting a benignant law upon ‘sensibility’, but o f bringing to bear an impossibly self­ contradictory power on a body which is itself hollowed and divided. W e have seen that the apparently august law is not quite what it appears to be; but we m ust also recognize that desire itself, which seem s so much m ore personal and immediate than the law’s anonym ous decrees, is itself a kind o f im personal force. D esire, in Ja c q u e s L acan ’s fam ous slogan, is the desire o f the Other. T o desire another is to desire what that other desires, since this desire is o f the other’s ‘essence’, and only by identifying with it can we therefore becom e one with the other. T h is is a paradoxical claim, however, since desire, which splits and disperses the subject, is no kind o f essence at all; so that to desire the other’s desire is to be as extrinsic to them as they are to them selves, caught up in the process o f their own decentrement. D esire never hits its target: it becom es entangled in the other’s lack and veers o ff beyond them. D esire curves around the body o f the other to rejoin itself, now doubly lacking since it has reduplicated its own yearning in the yearning o f the other. T o identify with the other is to m erge with what they’ lack, and thus in a sense to identify with nothing. T h e child does not desire the mother, but desires what she desires, or at least what it imagines her to desire, which is the imaginary plenitude it desires. In striving to figure this plenitude for the mother, to represent for her the imaginary phallus, the child discovers that it

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cannot succeed - that the mother’s desire swerves away beyond the child and outwards. It is not the child that women desire. It is this recognition which introduces lack into the child, reduplicating the lack o f the mother; the child lacks because what the mother lacks is not him. T h e intervention o f the castrating law or N am e o f the Father then converts the child’s lack from a specific one - his inadequacy visà-vis the m other - to a general one: with the repression o f desire into the unconscious the child is now lacking not just in a particular way bu t in general, in excess o f all particular objects. T h e cutting stroke o f the law generalizes the child’s lack to the very basis o f its being. Plunged into O edipal crisis, the child m ay not be able to name his lack, bu t he can at least m isnam e it. I f the m other does not desire him, it m ust be because she desires the father. B u t women do not desire the man, any more than they desire the child. T h e woman desires not the penis but the phallus, which is to say her own imaginary wholeness. B ut the phallus is an imposture which does not exist, other than as an ideological figment. Having vainly sought for it in the m other’s body, the child im agines that the father must possess it instead. In doing so, he mystifies the law to an imaginary plenitude, and seeks to identify with this instead a s the path to his own fulfilment. T h e m other may be castrated, bu t surely the law cannot be. Perhaps the fetish o f the law will block o ff the terrible knowledge o f castration. Bu t the law, too, is an ideological figment, and is mad with the sam e desire as the child. I f the child m isrecognizes the law, the law equally m isrecognizes the child; foT the child’s desire is not exacdy for the mother, but for the completion she symbolizes, for the imaginary phallus it deludedly locates in h er body. N one o f these individuals desire each other in the least; it’s nothing personal. D esire is purely im personal, a process or network without end or origin in which all three protagonists are caught up, yet which stems from none o f them and has none o f them as its goal. T h e three bodies in this scenario desire past each other all the tim e, converging only in the field o f the Other. T h e child plugs into the m other’s desire in the vain h ope that it too might thereby uncover the phallus it imagines her to w a n t I f the child cannot be the phallus for her, it can at least join her in the ceaseless pursuit o f it, thus staying with her in one sense while abandoning her in another. An identification with the mother’s desire is one which leads the child beyond her, separates it from her. T h e child rides out beyond the m other on the current o f her own desire.

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T h e on e I love m ay not be able to give m e the im aginary plenitude I seek , b u t sh e can at least give m e the m ost real thing sh e h as, nam ely h er ow n d e sire for the sam e plen itu de. W e give each o th er o u r desire, w hich is to say exactly that which neither o f u s can fulfil in the other. T o say ‘ I love you’ th us b eco m es equivalent to saying ‘ It’s you who can ’t satisfy m e !’ H ow privileged and un ique I m ust be, to rem ind you that it isn ’t m e you want . . . D e sire itself, then, w ould seem to operate in som eth in g o f an anonym ous, law -like m an n er; and this further co m p licates the classical aesth e tic m od el, w here d esire is generally conceived o f in term s o f in dividual n eed s or w ishes. T h e truth is that F re u d rejects all notion o f a ‘ su c c e ssfu l’ introjection o f the law, and th is is one o f his m ost rad ical ch allen ges to the tradition o f thought w e have exam ined. It is true that h e sp ea k s o f a final dissolution o f the O e d ip u s com plex; bu t it is d o u b tfu l how accu rate su ch a claim is to so m e o f his own m ost tro u b lin g insigh ts. T h e ego will never entirely m ake the su p e re g o its ow n; it will be em broiled instead in a co n stan t series o f fatiguin g tra d e -o ffs o r tactical negotiations betw een th e se ideals and u k ase s, an d th e harsh reality (o f both id and external w orld) which they catastrophically fail to take into account. T h e political implications o f this are o n c e m ore am bivalent. I f F re u d is right, th en we can say goodbye to all possibility o f utopia. T h e aesth etic ideal o f a benign law fully in tern alized an d appropriated a s the ground o f h um an freedom is an illusion. F o r one thing, the law is not in F re u d ’s e y es benign ; and fo r an oth er th in g su ch sp on tan eo u s appropriation is fo restalled by our profoun dly am bivalent resp on se to it. A t the sam e tim e , how ever, we can say goo d b y e to the dystopian vision o f a ‘total’ so cial o rd er which will have w holly in corporated its m em b ers, identifying their d esires entirely with its rule. S u c h a p rosp ect rem em b ers only our m asoch istic love for the law, not o u r sm ould erin g h atred o f it. T h e law is w hat b rin g s d e sire into bein g; but that d esire constantly offers to outrun an d d isru p t it, an d the lack which the law in trod u ces into the su b je c t is the very dynam ic o f this p ro c ess. ‘ In the struggle betw een law an d im p u lse’, w rites Philip Rieflf, ‘ there c a n be neither victory n or d e fe a t.’28 W e will never rest easy u n d er th e law, which politically sp e a k in g is both lo ss an d gain. F o r so m e law is indeed b en ign , p ro tec ts u s from injury an d creates the co n d ition s for com m unity betw een u s; an d the fact that in F re u d ’s view we will

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continue to resent the constraints o f even such enlightened law poses a serious political problem. O ur ability spontaneously to introject such a power, however, would also be our readiness to find in fascist dictatorship the path to unique personal fulfilment. M any individuals, o f course, have done precisely that; but if F reu d is to be believed it is not a condition which can be sustained without severe conflict. F reu d holds that women, for reasons associated with their particular Oedipal development, are less marked by the superego than men, and writes scornfully o f their scant capacity for instinctual renunciation. T h ere is, perhaps, som e truth in this sexist comment. T h e historical evidence would seem to suggest that women are on the whole less likely than m en to com e under the thrall o f transcendental signifiers, to be hypnotized by flag and fatherland, to spout o f patriotism or march bravely forward into the future shouting ‘L o n g live L ife!' T h e reasons for this are no doubt a good deal more historical than psychical: women have not generally been in a position to engage in such activities. Yet it may be true, even so, that these social factors interact with certain psychic structures, to render wom en in general more oblique to the symbolic order, more sceptical o f authority and more inclined than men to perceive its clay feet. B ecause o f their social conditions, but also perhaps because o f their unconscious relations to their own bodies, women are arguably more ‘spontaneously materialist* than men, who, more deeply marked by the phallus, would seem chronically inclined to abstract idealism . T h e phallus, as Jacqueline R ose has argued, is in any case a ‘ fraud1;29 but there may be psychological as well as historical reasons why women are somewhat quicker than men to spot this at the level o f social and political life, and so to be less easily duped by the arrogance o f power. M uch o f the point o f psychoanalytic practice is to com bat the sup erego's insane lack o f realism, to persuade it to lay down som e o f its more overbearing dem ands, or at least to make its burden more tolerable. Su ch treatment must try to m ake the superego more tolerant and rational, to deflate its false idealism and undermine its Pharisaical pretensions. In this process, the role o f the analyst, as a figure o f authority who is nevertheless forbearing and non-censorious, and who withdraws as far as possible from any libidinal involvement with the analysand, is o f key importance. T h e analyst m ust try to educate the patient’s desire away from its regressive subjection to parental authority, releasing it for more egalitarian relationships.

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S in ce reverence for the parent is our earliest form o f identification, this shift is bound to be painful and partial. Perhaps the m ost we can h ope for, in F reu d ’s eyes, is to establish som e modus vivendi with the sublim e wrath o f the superego, negotiating what more creative relationships we can within this forbidding framework. Psychoanalytic practice is concerned to wean us away from battles we cannot hope to win, persuade us out o f our doom ed agon with the dead so as to free those arrested energies for other ends. O f those ends themselves, Freudianism , like M arxism , has little prescriptive to say; Freud joins M arx in attem pting to shift us, this time at an individual level, from pre-history to history proper, resolving those conflicts which lock us into the past. When this has been achieved - when the ‘talking cure’ has run its course and we are more free to determine our own future history on the basis o f a revised narrative o f the past - the scene o f analysis, like revolutionary political practice, will wither away. In both cases, however, it is only by recollecting the terrors o f the past (what W alter Benjam in would call the tradition o f the oppressed) that we can em ancipate ourselves from them. Capitalist society, centred on the eternal repetition o f the commodity, neurotically represses the terrible truth that there was a time when it never was, in that gesture o f self-delusion known as ideology. W hat is involved in the scene o f analysis, to put the issue in political term s, is a gradual transition from the absolutist monarch o f the superego to what Freu d called the ‘constitutional monarch* o f the ego. T h e ego is the terrain on which law and desire conduct their frightful warfare, but always in a fraught, unstable, contradictory alliance. Within the person o f the patient, absolutist power m ust undergo the kind o f ‘aesthetic* transformation which Friedrich Sch iller called for, becom e more responsive to the sensuous needs and w ishes o f the subject. F o r Schiller, this was to be achieved by a fruitful interpenetration o f law and desire, as formal and sensual principles soften eath other’s importunity in the moment o f art or play. Freud has no such utopian hope; bu t this, one might claim, is politically all to the good. I f the scene o f analysis fosters a certain realistic acceptance o f the truth that we can never slay the father, it also breeds a degree o f critical scepticism o f his exorbitant exactions. It is a question o f neither denying nor appropriating the law, but o f nurturing an ambivalence towards it more creative than that infantile ambivalence which causes us pain.

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F re u d ’s stoiy o f the superego is a tragic narrative, in more senses than one. T h e superego is responsible for inflicting upon us grotesque suffering; but it also has the im placable high-mindedness o f all tragic art, an heroic m ode associated with aristocratic absolutism and ascetic self-renunciation. What can be pitted against this rem orseless purity is then comedy - a more tolerant, ironic, debunking form, inherently materialist and anti-heroic, which rejoices in human frailty and imperfection, wryly concedes that all ideals are flawed, and refuses to demand too much o f individuals so as to avoid falling into contemptuous disillusionment. All idealism is double-edged, spurring us productively onwards while rubbing our n oses in our inadequacies. Whoever dream s o f a pure revolution, rem arked Vladimir Lenin, will never live to see one. Com edy, like William Em pson’s pastoral, pays its dues to the edifying values o f truth, virtue and beauty, but understands how not to permit these admirable goals to terrorize humankind, to the point where people’s w eaknesses becom e painful to them and their self-esteem dwindles to nothing. Com edy and pastoral celebrate what individuals share in com m on beneath the skin, and proclaim that this is ultimately more significant than what divides them. One reason why political radicals may justifiably resent our present social system is that it forces us to pay an inordinate amount o f attention to divisions o f class, race and gender, which are not in the end all that important. It binds our energies ineluctably to these currently vital concerns, rather than freeing them for more rewarding purposes. Com edy’s mocking denigration o f what divides us is often enough a reactionary mystification; but there is also about it, as Christopher Norris writes o f Em pson’s ‘complex words’, *a down-to-earth quality o f healthy scepticism which . . . permits [us] to build up a trust in human nature on a shared knowledge o f its needs and attendant weaknesses’.30 F reu d had little trust in human nature, and som e o f the jokes he tells are execrable; but he knew like M arx and Em pson that no compassion for humanity which does not found itself upon a full look at the worst can be anything other than romantic sentimentalism. F o r all F reu d’s grim disenchantment, his pity for the plight o f the ego, booted as it is between id, superego and external world, is not far from the spirit o f comedy. What he failed to attain was the dialectical vision o f his fellow victim o f N azism Bertolt Brecht, who m anages as a M arxist com edian to combine an extraordinarily sensitive nose for the

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im perfect, unfinished state o f human affairs with the most resolute revolutionary commitment. In an epoch like our own, when these two options have becom e increasingly polarized and exclusive, Brecht offers a not inconsiderable lesson. N on e o f F reu d ’s psychoanalytic thought is finally separable from h is politics. Whatever his devoted crusade against the superego, he is politically speaking a pessim istic conservative authoritarian, full o f petty-bourgeois banalities about the insensate hysteria o f the m asses, the chronic indolence and stupidity o f the working class and the need for strong charismatic leadership.31 W hen Freud turns to direcdy political themes, a notable coarsening o f his intelligence sets in; like many a bourgeois intellectual, his ideological obtusenesses are at war with his native wit. I f Freud had lived through a different, more hopeful political history, much in his theoretical doctrine would no doubt have been transform ed. H e has little sense o f morality as anything but repression; morality for him is on the whole less a matter o f virtue, in the Aristotelian or M arxist sen se o f the quality o f a whole style o f living, than a set o f leaden injunctions. H is negative, drastically impoverished view o f human society valuably demystifies romantic idealism to the precise extent that it reproduces the shopsoiled platitudes o f the market place, where man is a w olf to man. H e can see nothing in the Christian comm andment to love all 6 f one’s neighbours than yet another overweening imperative o f the superego; as far as Freud is concerned, there just isn ’t that much libido to go around. H e holds, for example, that to love everyone involves an intellectually suicidal suspension o f judgem ent upon them, which is no part o f the Christian doctrine. As the D u ke remarks to L u cio in Measure fo r Measure: ‘Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.’ T h e Christian commandment to love others has little to do with libidinal cathexis, with the warm glow or the song in the heart. T o love the Soviets, for example, means refusing even to consider incinerating them , even if the consequence o f this is being incinerated by them ourselves. Sim ply to contemplate such a course o f action, let alone energetically prepare for it, is morally wicked, a form o f behaviour incompatible with love. It is absolutely wrong to prepare to commit genocide, the term ‘absolute’ here m eaning wrong irrespective o f any concrete historical circum ­ stances which could be stipulated as a justificatory' context for such an action. O ne does not need to find individual Soviets erotically

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attractive to su b scrib e to this view. I f F re u d alerts u s to the deep relation s betw een Eros and agape, he co n sid ers the n otion o f love too m uch in th e context o f the form er. W hatever his strictu res on the C h ristian injunction, F re u d certainly believes love to travel right back to the begin n in gs o f subjective life, and se e s in it on e o f the foun dation s o f h um an civilization. Psychoanalytic p ractice, a s Ju lia K risteva h as a rg u e d , is itse lf a form o f loving;32 and in d eed for F re u d love lies at the so u rc e o f all our psychical d ilem m as. It is b e cau se we are all ‘prem atu rely’ b o m that we requ ire an unusually exten ded p eriod o f m aterial an d em otional ca re from o u r p aren tal figures; an d it is within th is biologically essen tial intim acy that sexuality begin s to germ in ate. T h e p arad o x es o f law an d d e sire have their origin h ere: the fact that we are h elp less an d p ro tecte d allow s the p le asu re principle untram m elled sway, as the p relim in ary stage o f w hat will later beco m e d e sire ; bu t the sam e fact m ak es u s wholly d ep en d en t on o u r parental figu res, and so brings us from the very' o u tset into a profoun d su bm ission to authority. It is th ese two fo rce s - w hat Paul R ico eu r calls ‘the h istory o f d esire in its great debate with authority’,33 which will w age their deadly w arfare, ch ase each oth er’s tails, collude an d collide on the battleground which is o u r b o d ies. B u t this potential catastroph e c o u ld never have occu rred h ad we not been cared for a s infants, h ad love not b een in place, read y an d w aiting for u s, from the very b egin n in g. T h e playw right E d w ard B on d sp ea k s m ovingly in his p re fac e to L ear o f the ‘biological ex p e ctatio n s’ with which we are b o m - the expectation that the bab y’s ‘ u n p re p arc d n e ss will be cared for, that it w ill be given not only food b u t em otion al reassu ran ce, that its vulnerability will be sh ield ed , th at it will b e born into a w orld w aiting to receive it, and that know s how to receive it’ .34 T h is, B o n d su g g e sts, w ould signify a true ‘cu ltu re’ - w hich is why he re fu se s the term to con tem porary capitalist civilization. B o n d is surely right to claim that we have created a w orld which d o e s n ot know how to receive its new m em b ers. I f it u n d erstan d s how to w arm their milk an d m ash their fo o d , it is at a loss to know how to sh elter them from the p ossibility o f nuclear destruction, o r from the abrasive, uncaring relations which increasingly ch aracterize o u r way o f life. B o n d se e s that we have, s o to sp eak , a ‘righ t’ to cu ltu re, in a norm ative sen se o f that term , by virtue o f our biological stru ctu re , for that structure is such that w ithout culture we w ould quickly d ie. H u m an nature h as an ‘expectation ’ o f culture built

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into it, and to this degree certain kinds o f values are entailed by certain sorts o f facts. ‘Culture’ is at once a descriptive and evaluative concept: i f it designates on the one hand that without which we are factually speaking unable to survive, it is also a qualitative index o f the form o f social life which really does shield the weak and welcome the stranger, allows us to thrive rather than simply subsist. T h ere may here be the seeds o f a political morality which has its roots in the body without being, in som e naturalistic manner, reducible to it. What is m ost im portant about our biology is that it is structured around a gap or vacancy, where culture must implant itself. It is this kind o f enquiry which is forestalled by the present culturalist overreaction to biologism . As early as the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud was feeling his way towards such a theory: At early stages the human organism is incapable o f achieving this specific action [of satisfaction]. It is brought about by extraneous help, when the attention o f an experienced person has been drawn to the child’s condi­ tion by a discharge . . . T h is path o f discharge thus acquires an extremely important secondary function - viz., o f bringing about an understanding with other people: and the original helplessness o f human beings is thus the prim al source o f all moral motives.35 Before we have come to internalize the parental function, before the voice o f conscience begins to whisper disapprovingly in our car, the see d s o f morality have already been planted, in that dialectic o f dem and and response between bodies which is our earliest experience, and from which sexuality is a kind o f swerve or deviation. Morality has its origin not in the superego, but in the small infant’s affectionate gratitude for the care o f its elders. T h e political problem, for which Freud provides no ultimate solution, is that this affection m ust move within a context o f biologically determined dependency, so that the infant’s learning to love is inseparable both from a reverence for authority and from aggression. T o acquire a more reciprocal, egalitarian style o f loving is thus one o f the goals o f psychoanalysis, as it is o f revolutionary politics.

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Notes 1 Charles Levin, ‘Art and the Sociological Ego: Value from a Psycho­ analytic Perspective’, in John Fekete (ed.), Life After Postmodernism (London, 1988), p. 22. 2 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation, Society and Religion, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 12 (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 271. 3 William Em pson, Some Versions o f Pastoral (London, 1966), p. 114 (my emphasis). 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 40. 5 Fredric Jam eson, The Prison-House o f Language (Princeton, 1972), p. 108. 6 Paul Ricocur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven and London, 1970), p. 382. 7 Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality': Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (London, 1982), p. 6. 8 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 334. 9 See also J ulia Kristcva, ‘Freud and Love: T reatment and its Discontents’, in Toril M oi (ed.), The Kristcva Reader (Oxford, 1986). 10 See L eo Bersani, The Freudian Body (New York, 1986), p. 97. 11 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Sigmund Freud: On Metapsychology, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 376. 12 Ibid, p. 389. 13 See Sigm und Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Sigmund Freud:

On Metapsychology. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid, p. 425. Bersani, The Freudian Body, p. 22. Ibid, p. 23. Norman O . Brown, Life Against Death (London, 1968), p. 118. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 185. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, in Sigmund Freud: Civilisation, Society and Religion, p. 337. Sigmund Freud, The Future o f an Illusion, in Sigmund Freud: Cwilisation, Society and Religion, p. 192. See Sigm und Freud, ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, in Sigmund Freud: On Psychopathology, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 10 (Harmondsworth, 1979). Philip Ricff, Freud: The Mind o f the Moralist (Chicago and London, 1959), p. 159. Bersani, The Freudian Body, pp. 39f. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore and London, 1976), p. 102.

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25 Freud, The Future ofan Illusion, in Sigmund Freud: Civilisation, Society and Religion, p. 193. 26 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York, 1943), p. 273. 27 Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, in Sigmund Freud: Civilisation, Society and Religion, p. 299. 28 Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, p. 226. 29 Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 40. 30 Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London, 1978), p. 86. 31 Sec Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in

Sigmund Freud: Civilisation, Society and Religion. 32 Julia Kristeva, ‘Freud and Love: Treatment and its Discontents’, in Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, p. 248. 33 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 179. 34 Edward Bond, Lear (London, 1972), p. viiL See also my essay ‘Nature and Violence: the Prefaces o f Edward Bond’, in Critical Quarterly, vol. 26, nos. 1 and 2 (spring and summer, 1984). 35 Sigmund Freud, Projectfora Scientific Psychology, in Emst Kris (ed.), The Origins ofPsychoanalysis (New York, 1954), p. 379.

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The Politics o f Being: M artin Heidegger C on sid er what it is about any object that is at once constitutive o f its bein g and quite hidden from view. T o begin with, there is its temporality - the fact that what we see when we contemplate som ething is merely a kind o f snapshot or frozen moment o f the tem poral process which goes to make up its true nature. O ur dealings with things slice cross-sections into time, tearing objects away from the temporality which is o f their essence and carving them into m anageable synchronic chunks. I f this is true o f time, it is also true o f space: no object ever swims into view other than against the background o f som e ‘world’, some dimly apprehended set o f interlaced functions and locations. It is this network o f perspectives and relations, weaving a thing through to its core, which provides the very matrix within which it becom es identifiable and intelligible. A ‘w orld’ is just the fact that there could never simply be one object that any particular piece o f reality, to be comprehensible at all, must be already caught up in a vast, sprawling web o f elements to which it vaguely alludes, or (to alter the metaphor) must always be foregrounded against som e horizon which is never entirely fixable by ou r gaze. A world is not som e kind o f spatial object like the things it contains, totalized and retotalized as it continually is by human practice; this is why for phenomenology it is strange to speak o f the ‘external’ world, as though there could ever be a world in the first place without the human bodies which organize and sustain it. But this supportive context which makes possible the sighting o f any particular thing is always itself elusive, fading into indeterminacy as the thing itself surges forward. It is what we squint at sideways in viewing something, rather than have direcdy in our sights. And it

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could never b e g rasp ed a s a w hole, trailing o f f as it d o e s out o f the c o m e r s o f o u r vision, su g g e stin g an infinity o f p o ssib le con nection s beyond any actu al horizon. W e can s e e som eth in g b e ca u se it is p resen t to u s ; but what we can n ot u sually se e is w hat en ab led this p resen tn ess in the first place. H ow d o e s it co m e about that things are available to u s , given over to o u r u n d erstan d in g? T h e ob jects we view and touch have a kind o f im plicit accessib ility ab o u t them w hich, sin ce it is not a m aterial property like c o lo u r or volum e, we can easily take for g ran ted ; bu t in do in g so we e ra se the m ystery o f how things can com e in to o u r ken in any c a se , o f w hat it is that m ak es them so radically en cou n terab le. N o t only en co u n terab le, in d eed , but intelligible, at least potentially, which one can im agin e m ight not n ecessarily have been the ca se . W hat if the w orld w ere a s d esp erately o p aq u e to u s a s the im pen etrab le ocean o f S tan islav L e m ’s Solaris, elu d in g the reach o f ou r d isco u rse and u n d erstan d in g? W hat if ob jects w ere ju st not the so rt o f thing we could readily have any com portm en t with, but ap p ea red separated from u s by so m e un b rid geable g u lf? Is such sp ecu lation sheerly idle, o r d o e s it se e m s o only b e cau se we have su ccu m b ed to a n am n esia by w hich we fo rge t o u r aston ish m en t at the sim ple re ad y -to -h an d n ess o f reality, the fact that it is such that we can have regu lar d e alin g s with it? A nd w hat is it that explain s this fact? Is it enough to say that i f we could not know the w orld we w ould not b e here to know that we could not know it, sin c e such know ledge is essen tial to o u r survival? Finally, w hat we d o not see in an o b ject is that it m igh t ju st a s well never have b e e n . A s L e ib n iz fam ously enq u ires, why sh o u ld there be anything at all, rather than ju st nothing? H ow com e th at this uniquely p articu lar th in g h as replaced the n oth in gn ess that w ould otherw ise have been th ere, a n oth in gn ess which in certain m om en ts o f boredom o r anxiety w e im agine that we can still get a glim p se o f? Is it not a sto n ish in g th a t sin ce nothing actually needs to exist, s o many things sh o u ld ? A n d i f ob je cts are in this sen se radically con tin gen t, can they not b e se e n a s in so m e way shot through with a sort o f n othingness, how ever m u ch their replete p rese n ces m ight seem to deny it? W ould n ot th in gs th at actually had to exist, w hose b ein g w as som ehow n ecessary, be differen t from the random , replaceable b its and pieces we ob serve a ro u n d us? S u c h , w h ether a s sublim e insight o r m ystical raving, are som e o f the im p lication s o f what M artin H e id e g g e r calls B e in g , in cru d e and

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sum m ary fo rm . Any such bald accoun t o f co u rse d e m a n d s qualifying and develo p in g: in On Time and Being, for exam ple* H e id e g g e r will deny that B e in g is tem poral, though B e in g an d time ‘b e lo n g to geth er’ and reciprocally d eterm in e each other; and in the ‘C o n v ersatio n on a C o u n try P a th ’ he g o e s beyond the (still m etaph ysical) notion o f a spatial h orizon to the idea o f a ‘region ’ into w hich it op en s. (As H e id e g g e r pithily p u ts it in his all-too-im itable later m anner, ‘ R cgio n in g is a gath erin g an d re-sh elterin g for an exp an d ed restin g in an a b id in g.’) 1 I f w e can sp eak o f B ein g a t all, how ever, then at least for the early H e id e g g e r it is b e cau se am o n g the vario u s entities in the w orld th ere is on e in particular w hich, in the co u rse o f its selfrealization, finds itse lf unavoidably raisin g the q u estio n o f the fu n d am en tal nature o f all oth er entities, along with itself. T h is ‘ thing’ is D asein - th at p ecu liar m od e o f b e in g w hose e sse n c e takes the form o f e x isten ce, an d which lives itse lf m ost typically in an d through the hum an. In actu alizin g its own p ossibilities, D asein can n ot help but m ake m an ifest the things aroun d it, brin ging them to articulation within its ow n en terp rise; an d this p ro c ess, w hereby D asein allow s the b ein g s a ro u n d it to b e w hat they are, liberates th em into selfd isclo su re , is for H e id e g g e r the tran scen den ce w hich o p en s up B ein g. T h e u n d e rstan d in g this entails is by no m ean s in the first place a m atter o f the co n cep t - o f a know ing su b ject co n fron tin g a knowable ob ject w hich it can represen t to itself. F o r D asein , b e fo re arriving at any such co gn itio n , finds itse lf always already in co m m erce with other things in w ays w hich p resu p p o se a certain prim ordial a c c e ss to them , a p ractical orientation o r fam iliarity which is already a kind o f u n d e rstan d in g before the event, and which lays th e ontological foun dation o f all m ore form al knowing. T o know so m eth in g rationally o r scien tifically is dep en d en t on som e m ore basic availability’ o f the thing to D asein ; an d B ein g , in at least one o f its various se n se s, is w hatever it is which allow s this a priori availability o f o b je cts to occur, that which h a s already h an ded them over to Dasein in a so n o f prerational, p rc-cogn itive intim acy and recognition. O n e can think o f truth in classica l style a s an ad eq u ation betw een m in d and world, su b ject an d ob ject; but for any such co rresp on d en ce to get set up a g oo d deal m u st already have h appen ed. W here did th is su b ject and ob ject com e from , how did their very intelligibility a rise , and from w here d o w e derive the com plicated p ro ced u res by w hich they m ight be som eh ow com p ared ? T ru th as proposition al, H e id e g g e r argu es in

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The Essence o f Truth, m u st itse lf rely on som e d eep er un coverin g o f th in gs, a lettin g o f p h en om en a be in their p re se n tn e ss which is the effect o f D asein 's tran scen den ce. F o r u s to a sse rt som ething p re su p p o se s a dom ain o f ‘o p e n n ess’ in which Dasein an d the world have already en cou n tered one another, have never not already en cou n tered , w ere n ever sep arab le in the first place. Dasein is that free d rift o f tran scen d e n ce which finds itse lf con stan tly p assin g over from the sh e e r fact o f oth er entities to the q u estio n o f their very B ein g ; an d it is th is tran scen d en ce which op en s u p w hat H e id e g g e r ca lls the ‘o n tological d iffere n ce ’ w hereby we d istin gu ish between b ein g s an d B e in g , u n d erstan d in g that the latter can never be exh au sted by the form er. It is a s though D asein lo cates itse lf in the division betwreen the two, in sertin g itse lf there a s a kind o f gap, relation o r ‘in b etw een ’. B ein g , th en , is that ‘clearin g ’ o r realm o f en cou n ter w hich is n eith er su b je c t n or o b ject but, a s it w ere, the sp o n tan eo u s availability o f each to the other. I f B ein g is w hat essentially d eterm in es som eth in g as it is, then th e m ost b asic feature o f things, for the early H e id e g g e r at least, is th a t they are able som ehow to com port th em selv es with us lon g befo re w e have ach ieved any determ in ate know ledge o f them . B e in g is th u s a resp o n se to the q u estion : W hat m u st alw ays already have taken p la c e for o u r traffic with the w orld to be p ossib le? D aseins ow n p ecu liar b e in g is to co m p reh en d B ein g , to find itse lf always in the m idst o f u n d e rsta n d in g a s the very m edium o f its p ractical projects. S in c e it is p rim arily B ein g-in -th e-w o rld it is a fo rm o f existence ineluctably re ferre d to other things, and it is in this b o u n d -u p n ess with th in gs th at it b rin gs them to self-d isclosu re. T h e r e is an ob viou s parallel betw een this exotic style o f thought an d the tran scen d en talism o f classical idealist ph ilosoph y. I f B e in g is the very accessib ility o f ob je cts in the first place, then i t b ears a clear relation to K a n t’s tran scen d en tal stan dpoin t upon the w'orld. B u t it a lso thereby b e a r s a p ecu liar relation to the K an tian aesth etic, which a s we have se e n involves the m ystery o f how m ind and w orld sh ap e up to each o th e r in som e un spoken com pact, as the b a sis o f any p articu lar act o f cogn ition . I le id e g g e r’s celebrated co n cep t o f ‘preu n d e rsta n d in g ’ - o f the way in w hich, within the in escapable circularity o f all in terpretation , ph en om en a m u st be som eh ow already intuitively co m p reh en sib le in o rd er to be known - h ark s back in this se n se to K a n t’s aesth etic am azem en t that the w orld is the kind o f

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thing in general that can be understood. It is as though H eidegger has now thoroughly ontologized this aesthetic claim, so that K an t’s aesthetic perception, which is yet to arrive at any definitive knowledge bu t is the perm anent precondition o f doing so, becom es in the concept o f Dasein the persistent orientation o f human existence to a mute familiarity with what surrounds it. In his work on Nietzsche, H eidegger defends the Kantian doctrine o f aesthetic disinterested­ n ess by translating it into the terms o f his own thought: ‘in order to find som ething beautiful’, he argues, ‘we m ust let what encounters us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and worth . . . We must freely grant to what encounters us as such its way to be; we m ust allow and bestow upon it what belongs to it and what belongs to us.’ 2 Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness thus becom es equivalent to H eideggerian Being, Kantian ‘beauty’ the com ing forth o f the object in all its ontological purity. H um an existence is thus for H eidegger ‘aesthetic’ in its most fundamental structures; and it is part o f his criticism o f K ant in Kant and the Problem o f Metaphysics that he backs o ff from this subversive insight. F o r K ant, what m ediates between sensibility and understand­ ing is the transcendental imagination, which constructs the schem ata that make all knowledge possible; it is this imagination which on H eidegger’s reading o f Kant ‘forms in advance the aspect o f the horizon o f objectivity as such’.3 T h e imagination is the common source o f sensibility and understanding, and the root o f practical reason as well. K ant has thus aestheticized the very grounds o f knowledge, undermining the foundation o f pure reason in the very act o f laying it down; but he shies nervously away from the radicalism o f his own move, loath to admit anything as lowly as the imagination (which is commonly coupled with sensibility) as the basis o f reason itself. H eidegger him self will project that transcendence out o f K ant’s epistemological realm into the very ontology o f Dasein itself, seeing in that the process by which Dasein ’s routine truck with the world continually opens up a horizon within which the Being o f beings becom es discernible prior to any cognitive engagem ent with them. I f for K ant, however, the aesthetic is a kind o f rounding upon or objectifying o f our own cognitive capacities, no such objectification is fully possible for Dasein , given that radical temporality which brings it constantly to outrun or get ahead o f itself. T h e re is in Being and Time an interesting tension between two

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different conceptions o f the relations between Dasein and its world. O n the one hand, the whole notion o f Dasein as Being-in-the-world tends to question as a false metaphysical duality the very distinction between Dasein and world implicit in the term ‘relation’. T h e world is not a space which Dasein is ‘in*, as ink is in a bottle; if it is o f the very nature o Ï Dasein to be wrapped up in reality, to be constituted through and through by what H eidegger calls its ‘care’, then existence as such trangrcsses any dichotomy between inner and outer, subject and object. T h e world is not ‘external’ to Dasein ; on the contrary, there could be no ‘world’ without it, as opposed to som e background o f m eaningless materiality. T h e world is a part or a project o f Dasein quite as much as Dasein is always ‘outside* itself, ec-static, constantly passin g over beyond things in that movement o f transcendence which opens up Being itself. As a kind o f ‘in between*, yet nothing as substantive as a ‘relation’, Dasein (as the very' term suggests) is a ‘here’ which is always also a ‘there’, always out ahead o f itself, non-selfidentical, and is thus no ‘thing* to be inside another thing but a sheer process o f going over. Dasein is dependent on reality, since to be bound up in it is o f its very essence; and conversely the world is dependent on Dasein , i f not for its existence (H eidegger is no subjective idealist) then for that significant self-disclosure which is its Being. I f Being is that by which objects becom e present to Dasein , then there can be Being only as long as Dasein inrupts into the midst o f things as a revelatory force. T here can b e no truth without Dasein , since Being and truth are simultaneous. Dasein and the world are thus correlatives o f one another: if Dasein s activity is necessary for there to be Being at all, then for the early H eidegger the world is centred upon Dasein as its ultimate reference point. Dasein , as H eidegger puts it, is the ‘destination’ o f all other things, which wait mutely to be uncovered by it. Yet at the sam e time Dasein is ‘referentially dependent’4 on the things around it, in a way which prevents it from ever fully m astering them. What H eidegger calls its ‘thrownness’ , its condition o f simply finding itself propelled willy-nilly into the midst o f reality, designates both its non-mastery o f its own being and its reliance upon others. Ju st in order to exist in its own style, Dasein's structure com pels it to a persistent comprehension o f the entities around it, projected as it is beyond any one o f them towards the unattainable completeness o f grasping the totality o f beings as such. Dasein and the world, then, are centred upon one another in what one

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might loosely term an ‘imaginary* relation: the latter cannot be made present without the former, just as one might speculate that the small infant finds it intolerable that reality could go on existing in its own absence. W ithin this mutual complicity, at least for the early H eidegger o f Being and Time, Dasein retains a certain ontological priority; and this betrays in the text the trace o f a certain residual humanism, however m uch any simple identity between Dasein and humanity may be denied. T h at priority, indeed, is also a kind o f cleavage between Dasein and its world, which provides the alternative version o f the relation between them in the work. It is the tension between an ‘authentic* Dasein , choosing its own m ost individual possibilities in a resolute living-towards-death, and that degraded world o f prattle, idle curiosity and anonymous m ass existence into which it keeps falling (‘Prattle’ (Gerede) signifies for H eidegger empty, rootless talk, such as ‘Saying says sayingly what it says in its own saying*, which could be a sentence from the later H eidegger). T h e very world which goes to constitute Dasein thus also poses a threat to it; and this can be read in part as a conflict between an ontological and a political sense o f the term ‘world*. A s the realm o f B ein g in general, the world is inseparable from Dasein's very structure; a s an actual social environ­ m ent it is a considerably more bleak and alienating sphere, the place o f the faceless 4das M an who confiscates one’s authenticity. T h is discrepancy is regulated by being itself ‘ontologized*: inauthenticity, H eidegger grimly insists, is not only a perm anent ontological possibility o f Dasein but for the m ost part its m ost typical m ode o f being. ‘Falling* into a degrading reality, tarnishing its purity in a set o f aim less involvements in which Being is covered up and forgotten, is built into Dasein *s very nature, since as Being-in-the-w orld it realizes itse lf only through its w rapped-upness in things. T h e very source o f its free self-actualization is thus also what contam inates it; it is unable to b e itself without erring, incapable o f recollecting its unitary being without first having forgotten i t H eidegger thus informs us that he d o cs not intend his descriptions o f D asein's inauthentic m odes to be derogatory: they are part o f its ‘given* possibilities, without which it could not be what it is. T h is disclaim er is singularly unconvincing: these descriptions quite clearly are negative, enforcing a rigorous distinction between Dasein in its ‘proper* and ‘improper* conditions. T h e two states o f being are held apart even a s they mutually mark and

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implicate one another. On the one hand, Dasein is inseparable from its world; on the other hand it is som ething o f a vagrant or alien in history, ‘thrown’ into reality in the first place as houseless and unprotected, and sum m oned beyond this dismal facticity into an authentic encounter with its own lonely finitude and death. In the crisis o f resolution, Dasein chooses to be what it is, recognizes its possibilities as its own rather than as determ ined by the anonymous Other, and projects itself forward towards death in a movement o f separation from and re-engagem ent with the objects o f its concern. S u ch movement could be seen as a kind o f rupturing o f its ‘imaginary’ relations with the world - an entry into the ‘symbolic order* whose structures are those o f finitude, difference, individuation and death. W hen H eidegger is thinking in these term s, he tends to underline the apartness o f Dasein as a form o f self-referentiality: if all other essen ts find their destination in it, Dasein itself cannot be referred beyond itself but exists as its own end. Its peculiar m ode o f being is to be concerned about itself, even if this self-concern necessarily takes the form o f an immersion in the world. Because it is essentially tem poral, its working out o f its own authentic ‘destiny’ takes the shape o f being constandy out ahead o f itself and to that extent non-selfidentical, deflected from a brooding upon its own being by its enm eshm ent in reality. In a Hegelian move* however, such errancy is ju st the way Dasein ceaselessly returns to itself: the moment o f ‘anxiety’, for instance, in which Dasein in the course o f its mundane involvements suddenly glim pses the nullity o f things, can be profoundly therapeutic, recalling it to its own inwardness away from what H eidegger describes as its ‘captivation’ by objects. Being and Time thus turns to a kind o f advantage the very temporality which jeopardizes the integrity o f Dasein with its spacings and diffusions; for this temporality is also the very medium o f Dasein's ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, its unflinching orientation towards the future certainty o f its own extinction. I f Dasein can even now appropriate that future death, stark signifier o f its finitude and contingency, ‘retroject’ it into its current existence, then it is able to bind and brace itself in this constant prolepsis. I f it can embrace the contingency symbolized in its future death then it can somehow live that contingency as inner necessity; and in a similar way it can appropriate the pure givenness o f its past (its ‘thrownness’) in order to be resolutely at every moment w hat it has been. T h is ‘aesthetic* style o f existence no longer simply

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abolishes time, reducing it to pure synchronicity in the m anner o f som e earlier aesthetic thought; rather, it constructs from the stu ff o f a fallen history a more authentic mode o f temporality, which has precious little to do with historicity in any received sense o f the term. (H eidegger’s ‘authentic’ history, Lukacs comm ents in Realism in Our Time, is not distinguishable from ahistoricity.) It is from such ‘prim ordial’ temporality, indeed, that for H eidegger our everyday m eanings o f time and history' are derived. Dasein , then, as a transfiguration o f contingency into necessity, and o f the facticity o f life into an inwardly appropriated law, exhibits som e o f the features o f the work o f art. S u ch an aestheticization, however, can only ever be partial. For we have seen already that Dasein s authenticity is inseparable from a certain errancy or untruth; and though it is in som e sense selfreferential, it can never becom e wholly totalized or self-determining. T h e rejection o f such self-determ ination, which belongs to the transcendental subject, is the price H eidegger’s thought has to pay for a refusal to ‘subjectivize’ Dasein in the manner o f some anthropological hum anism , which would simply be a perpetuation o f metaphysical thought. T h e ‘thrownness’ o f Dasein m eans that it can never be its own m aster, never mistake itself for the originary source o f its own being. It is unfinished, dependent and in part self-opaque, unable to round upon its own process o f constitution in a moment o f utter self­ transparency. T o this extent, one might claim, Dasein is a nonaesthedc form o f being, shot through with negativity, always eccentric to itself. O n the one hand, then, Dasein is continually ‘captivated’ (eingenom­ men) by other beings and reverberates in attunement with them, in som e fundamental compact or alliance with the world which resem bles K an t’s aesthetic condition. On the other hand it is prior to and transcendent o f that world, preserving its precarious authenticity by a ceaseless separation from it, as well as by a resolute engagement with it. I f there are philosophical - and broadly political - reasons why it is no longer enough to imagine humanity a s a solitary, self-enclosed subject confronting an inert object - if that now discredited form o f transcendental subjectivity has been sharply decentred into material reality - then there are also good political reasons why this should not

be thought to entail an uncritical celebration of ‘worldliness’. H eidegger is deeply enough m arked by Kierkegaard to write o ff the

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public sphere itself as inherently inauthentic: what in the early, affirmative days o f bourgeois society' was a realm o f civilized social intercourse has now deteriorated to an alienated domain o f ad­ m inistered processes and manipulated m ass opinion. Monopoly capitalism has now penetrated into the bourgeois public sphere itself, reorganizing it in accordance with its own reificatory logic. But the monopoly capitalism which has dehumanized this public domain is also in the process o f well and truly undermining the classical bourgeois conception o f the free, self-determ ining individual; and this is one reason why H eidegger cannot espouse Kierkegaard’s own alternative to *dasM an\ the intensely inward subject o f spiritual faith. O r at least such inwardness must now be prised loose from the em pirical individual and lifted into some ontological sphere (Dasein) which is, with suitable ambiguity, both a subject and not a subject. T h is effort to rethink traditional notions o f subjectivity, and a patrician disdain for the public, both arise from a ‘higher* capitalism which is eroding at once the liberal humanist subject and the civic space in which it has traditionally consorted with others o f its kind. B u t the shared historical source o f these twin doctrines in H eidegger cannot eradicate the tension between them. Dasein as an idea is at once a rem orseless assault on the philosophy o f the autonomous subject, capsizing that subject into the world in ec-static disunity with itself, and at the sam e time the latest in a long series o f privileged, aestheticized, quasi-transcendental ‘subjects* jealously protecting their integrity and autonomy from the taint o f the quotidian. T h e two perspectives will enter into unholy alliance in H eidegger’s later N azism : the thrown, decentred subject will becom e the se lf humbly subm issive to the earth, while authentic, self-referential Dasein will em erge as the elitist vocation o f the Herrenvolk for the glorious selfsacrifice o f death. Death, as H eidegger argues in Being and Time, is that which is absolutely one’s own, non-relational and non-alienable, a kind o f paradigm o f private property which the faceless public ‘they* can never steal. D eath individualizes Dasein to its roots, tearing it away from all Being-with-others; and it is thus perhaps not surprising that such Being-with-others, supposedly an ontological structure o f Dasein , receives relatively perfunctory treatment in Being and Time. T h o u gh H eidegger’s capacity to derive mystified maxims from idealized peasant societies appears well-nigh inexhaustible, it is striking that Gemeinschaft - the organic community so favoured by the

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radical right - attracts somewhat scant attention in his nostalgic m aunderings. It could be claim ed, then, that a central ideological dilemma o f Being and Time is how to protect an essential subversion o f the transcen­ dental subject against an ignominious collapse o f the subject into a debased ‘mass* history. T o put the point in a different way: how is Dasein to sustain the kind o f imaginary relation with the world which will make it feel at home there, and which a s we have seen in K an t is epitomized in the aesthetic, without losing track o f its own priority and integrity? But how in turn is that priority over the world to be distinguished from a purely tragic sense o f estrangement and contingency? N ot to claim some privileged status for Dasein would seem to be to succum b to positivism, stripping the human o f its distinctiveness; to do so, however, risks reproducing the very ideology o f M an ’s dominance over N ature with which that positivism belongs. As long as the shadow o f such a hum anism is cast over Being and Timey H eidegger has still not escaped the metaphysical duality o f subject and object. A s Being-in-the-w orld, Dasein is supposedly prior to all such divisions, the sheer ungrounded nothingness or transcendence which opens up their possibility in the first place. Yet if its recurrent bouts o f ontological anxiety - m ade possible by that very transcendence - illuminate the nullity o f things, a fissure is bound to open up between such things and Dasein itself, now sternly recalled to its ‘proper’ task o f self-realization. In this sense a division healed at the ontological level insists on breaking out again in the existential realm . It is from this duality that the Sartre o f Being and Nothingness will take his cue, appropriating from Being and Time all that makes it a tragic text. It becom es possible, in other words, to exploit the equivocations o f H eidegger by subordinating his apparent transcen­ dence o f the subject-object divide to the vision o f a sense-bestowing subject set over against a reality drained o f immanent meaning.5 H eidegger’s fam ous turn or Kehre in the period after Being and Time represents a drastic solution to these dilemmas. T o approach Being itse lf through the optic o f Dasein is still a residually metaphysical manoeuvre, since metaphysics can grasp Being only from the standpoint o f particular beings. M etaphysics is bom o f the oblivion o f the difference between Being and beings, construing the former on the model o f the latter. T h is gesture must thus be put into reverse,

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and Dasein examined from the standpoint o f Being itself. In the later H eidegger, accordingly, the emphasis falls increasingly upon Dasein as the ‘there’ o f Being itself, Being’s own free self-revelation in a particular mode. Dasein is a coming to p ass o f Being more fundam ental than humanity itself, the source or essence o f the human which itself em erges out o f the still more originary abyss o f Being itself. Being now seizes priority over its own ‘there’, throwing it out or withdrawing it in accordance with the necessities o f its own nature. ‘Only so long as Dasein is, is there Being’, H eidegger had written in Being and Time ; but in the Letter on Humanism he will add the crucial qualification that ‘the fact that the D a , the lighting as the truth o f B ein g itself, com es to pass is the dispensation o f Being itself’.6 It is now Being, in short, which has the upper hand, bringing about its own illumination. ‘M an* is simply a relation to Being, responsive and delivered up to it; what thinks in human thought about Being is evoked by Being itself. Thought is just a kind o f acquiescence in Being, a docile letting be o f it, recollecting and giving thanks for it. Throughout the work o f the post-Kehre H ei digger, it is Being - not o f course to be mistaken for anything as metaphysical as a su b je c t!which arrives, bestows, descends, withdraws, gathers, advances, shines forth. T h e role o f humanity is to be simply the shepherd and preserver o f this mystery, which H eidegger will progressively speak o f as ‘ holy* and connect with ‘the god s’.7 History itself is now simply the successive epochs o f Being’s self-donation or self-concealment, as humanity is thrown o ff and gathered back to it like som e ontological yo-yo. T h e relation between Being and Dasein in the later H eidegger is thus more full-bloodedly ‘imaginary’ than it was in Being and Tim e . It is not only that Dasein is slavishly dependenron the mysteiy o f Being; it is also that Being has a reciprocal need o f Dasein . Sein requires its D a: it is part o f Being’s inner necessity to arrive at articulation, much like the Hegelian Idea, and humanity convenientiy provides the place where this may happen, the ‘clearing’ in which Being com es partly to light. Dasein is Being’s mouthpiece: there is a primordial complicity between ‘M an ’ and Being, which spring together from an ‘event* or Ereignis m ore fundamental than either o f them. ‘It is imperative’, H eidegger writes in Identity and Difference, ‘to experience simply this Eignen (suited, fitting), in which man and B ein g are ge-eignet (suited, fitted, en-owned) to one another Humanity and Being are

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‘assigned to each other’, at once held apart in difference and at one. If this is crypto-mystical speculation, it is o f an ideologically consoling kind. ‘Being’ is now taking over from ‘world’, so that an affinity with the former com pensates for an alienation from the latter. It is not that Dasein's distressing tendency to cover up and eradicate Being is any less grievous: ‘technology* is the later H eidegger’s vague portmanteau term for this catastrophe. But Being would now appear to bring about its own concealedness, oblivion o f it being part o f its own inner destiny. ‘Technology is in its essence a destiny within the history o f B ein g and o f the truth o f Being, a truth that lies in oblivion’, com m ents H eidegger in the Letter on Humanism. Erasing and forgetting Being is as much part o f it as anything else, and so as much within its ‘truth’. H eidegger had argued in Being and Time that the essence o f Dasein is hom elessness: it is o f the nature o f human existence to be estranged and deracinated. T h is theme continues in his later writings; but it is now ‘dwelling’ or ‘at-hom eness’ which would appear more fundam ental. ‘Dwelling . . . is the basic character o f Being in keeping with which mortals exist’, he writes in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’.9 Whatever the depredations o f technological reason, Dasein is essentially at home in the world. Ju st as Being and Time turned Dasein ’s straying and lostness into valid constituents o f its nature, so the later H eidegger finds in Being a claim upon humanity which will not abandon it even when it w anders off. ‘We come back to ourselves from things’, he writes in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, ‘without ever abandoning our stay am ong things. Indeed, the loss o f rapport with things that occurs in states o f depression would be wholly im possible if even such a state were not still what it is as a hum an state: that is, a staying with things.” 0 W hereas in Being and Time an involvement with the world was always a possible deviation from Dasein ’s own authentic self-reference, it is now an abiding with things which appears m ost authentic, and the recoil upon on eself subsum ed easily within it. T h e crisis o f anxiety, o f that dispirited sense o f the nullity o f objects which unhinges us from them, is blandly sublated into a more prim ordial at-hom eness. Paradoxically, we are m ost in touch with reality when we transcend it in a movement o f separation, for such transcendence discloses its Bein g, which is what is most ‘n ear’ about it. T h e yawning g u lf which a technological capitalism has opened up between humanity and its world is covered over in a

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fantasy o f eternal symbiosis. Being as such remains as a whole contingent: H eidegger denies it all metaphysical grounding, viewing it sim ply as suspended in the movement o f its own nothingness. What ‘grounds' B ein g is just this perpetual surge o f its own free transcendence, which is itself a kind o f no-thing. H eidegger’s Being is abyssal and anchorless, a kind o f groundless ground, which sustains itse lf like the work o f art in its own free, pointless play. Yet i f Being as a whole is thus contingent, Dasein , curiously, is not, since Being has n eed o f it, contains an interior indigence which Dasein must supplem ent. Viewed as a part o f Being, Dasein would seem to share its non-necessity; viewed in relation to Being, it would appear graciously dispensed from such a fate. And this is indeed welcome news for an alienated humanity, even if the heavy price paid for it is a virtual extinction o f the subject as free agent and a philosophy resonant with portentous vacuities. ‘O ne speaks’, com m ents T h eodo r Adorno in TheJargon o f Authenticity, ‘from a depth which would be profaned if it w ere called content.’11 T o claim that B ein g needs Dasein is actually to say no more than that the world needs an interpreter to b e interpreted. Part o f the function o f the later H eidegger’s rhetorical devices is to slide this unexceptionable case close to the mystical vision o f a Being which adopts and solicits humanity in the m anner o f a divinity and its votaries. I f the consoling ideological fiction o f a world which posits and requires the human is no longer viable, it can be replaced with the alternative imaginary circuit o f a Bein g-as-disclosure for which the existence o f Dasein is imperative. T h e primary form o f that disclosure, in the later H eidegger, is language.12 Lan guage is the privileged mode in which Being articulates itself in humanity, and poetry is its essence: ‘ Poetry is the saying o f the unconcealedness o f b ein gs.’ 13 What is expressed in language is the original unity o f nam es an d things, the primordial source where meaning and being are undivided. ‘ Lan guage’, H eidegger writes in his Introduction to Metaphysics, ‘is the prim ordial poetry in which a people speaks “ bein g” .’14 T o live properly is to live poetically, rapt in the mystery o f B ein g, knowing on eself to be its humble ventriloquist. In ‘T h e Origin o f the W ork o f Art’, it is the artefact itself which has now becom e the obedient D a or ‘there’ o f Being, the sacral locus o f its self-disclosure. T h is not to say that H eidegger has m uch time for aesthetics in its classical sen se. In ‘A D ialogue on L an gu age’, he dism isses such

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d isco u rse a s irredeem ably m etaphysical, bound up with the whole d iscred ited p roblem atic o f represen tation .1- T h e early H e id e g g e r may be said to return in stead to the aesth etic in its original Baum gartenian m ean in g - to a con cern with that con crete life-w orld which h erm en eutical ph enom enology takes a s the centre o f its enquiry. I f there is an ‘aesth e tic s’ in Being and Time, it is ju st th is recognition o f the in elu ctab le w orldliness o f all m eaning, the fact that we are always already p itch ed into the m idst o f things, experien cin g the w orld on o u r b o d ie s b e fo re we com e properly to form ulate it in o u r h eads. T o ‘know ’ is to rupture and estran ge that spon tan eous com m erce with ob jects w hich o u r bodily structure fo rces upon us, and which will return to satu rate o u r thinking in an appropriate ‘m o o d ’, sin ce for H e id e g g e r th ere can be no m o o d less thought. All that is richest and m ost p ositive in H e id e g g e r’s philosophy flows fro m this profound m aterialism , respon sible as it is for so m uch o f the dep th , im aginative fertility a n d adven turous originality o f Being and Time. It is in this earlier ‘a esth e tic’ - in this insistence on the practical* affective, p rereflexive g ro u n d s o f all cognition - that H e id e g g e r’s project co n sorts m ost productively with those o f M arx and F re u d . It w ould not be difficult, fo r exam ple, to trace suggestive affin ities betw een the structure o f ‘c a re ’ which typifies D asein and the M arx ist con cept o f social in terests. Y et the problem is not only that th e se very sam e m otifs, in H e id e g g e r ’s caree r a s a whole, b elon g with an extravagant o v er-reaction to En lighten m ent rationality which will plunge him into a fascistic m ythology o f stout sp ee ch le ss p easants a n d aloofly laconic sag e s. It is a ls o that the broader, d eep er, m ore g e n e ro u s sen se o f the aesth etic o f Being and Time co-h ab its all alo n g with a n arrow ed, postB au m g arten ian sen se o f the term - the aesth etic as a uniquely privileged, authentic, self-referential style o f being, sharply distinguished from the drably quotidian. A s a gen eral B ein g-in -th e-w o rld , Dasein h as about it som eth in g o f the original, ph en om en ological connotation o f the aesth etic: even if it is hardly a sensuous p h en om en on , it inhabits the realm s o f the affective and som atic, is m arked by its biological finitude a n d run s up again st a density in things irredu cible to som e abstract re aso n . A t the sam e tim e, a s a form o f authentic selfactualization b ro od in g upon its own unique possibilities, Dasein con tain s m o re than an ech o o f the old R om an tic su b ject, now forced to en co u n ter a facticity which its freedom cannot dissolv e away, but nonetheless bent upon transform ing that very thrownness, contingency

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and mortality into the ground o f its heroic self-recuperation. T h e esoteric and the everyday, the aesthetic as both solitary splendour and m undane conduct, commingle in the very structure o {D asein, as they do in a different sense in H eidegger’s style o f writing, with its bathetic mixture o f the oracular and the ordinary'. H is style is well practised in the device o f investing humble particulars with ontological status, elevating som ething as empirical as bad tem per into a fundamental structure o f Being. In this he anticipates the N azi conjoining o f the com m onplace and the sublime, hom espun wisdom and heroic elitism. ‘Fallen ness into Gerede and a lostness proximaily and for the m ost part in Mitsein * might be his description o f a tea-break. O n the one hand, this device im presses with its dem otic flavour: how liberated o f philosophy to stoop for its staple themes to ham m ers and forest paths - to allow you, as the excited young Sartre was to realize, to do philosophy by talking about the ash tray. O n the other hand, these m odest bits and pieces o f the world win their new-found ontological dignity only at the cost o f being violently naturalized, frozen to perm anent fixtures. T h e mundane is mythologized to the precise extent to which philosophy appears to clim b o ff its pedestal. Quoting H eidegger’s b elief that philosophy ‘belongs right in the m idst o f the labour o f farm ers’, Adorno remarks that one would like at least to know the farm ers’ opinion o f that.16 W hat will happen in H eidegger’s later work is a steady convergence o f these two sen ses o f the aesthetic, such that Being in general com es to the fore, but now im bued with all the m ysterious privilege o f the aesthetic in the more specialized Romantic sense. B ut since B ein g is everything, the more general sense o f the aesthetic is retained: the whole world is now an artefact, a self-sustaining play o f sheer becom ing. In Being and Time, Dasein was the final reference point for all things but an end in itself; now this self-reference is projected into the whole o f Being, whose autonomy Dasein merely exists to give voice to. Dasein no longer marks its particular difference from other e ssen ts in having its end in itself; it is just the clearing o f light which reveals this to be true o f all other beings a s well. T h e whole o f Being is thus aestheticized: it is the autotelic, eternally unfinished unfolding which we observed in the early Dasein , but without the anguished, tim e-ridden, crisis-rocked nature o f that doom ed phenomenon. B eing, like the work o f art, combines freedom and necessity: it is a kind o f ground o f all things, and so gives them the law, but since it

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lacks any groundedness itself it is also a sort o f non-ground o f pure freedom , a game which simply plays itself out. I f Being is aestheticized in this way, so is the thought which thinks it, which has no result or effect and simply ‘satisfies its essence in that it isV 7 Philosophy is more like praying than proposing: it is sacred ritual rather than secular analysis, grounded in the very Being to which it returns perpetual homage and gratitude. In Kant and the Problem o f Metaphysics, H eidegger argues that cognition for Kant is primarily intuition, that the understanding is in the service o f sensibility; and his own aestheticizing o f thought returns him in effect to Fichte and Schelling, whose ‘absolute ego* or ‘state o f indifference* are likewise attem pts to transcend the subject-object duality. I f B ein g and thought are m ade aesthetic m atters in H eidegger, so also in a sense is ethics. T here can be no question o f trying to produce a concrete ethics, a project which belongs with metaphysical rationalism. Ethos, we are instructed in the Letter on Humanism, means ‘abode* or ‘dwelling place*, and so can be instantly subsum ed under H eideggerian ontology. T h e true law is that o f B ein g itself, not som e merely hum an fabrication o f rules. B u t this reduction o f ethics to ontology is m ade possible in the first place because H eidegger has covertly projected normative categories into Being itself, while immediately erasing this gesture. Truth is inherent in the essence o f things, so that aletheia or the act o f disclosing them is at once a question o f fact and value. T h e descriptive and the evaluative are held together in the word ‘Being*: what is m ost significant about an object is simply what it is. Dasein , similarly, is both fact and value: that it should comprehend B ein g is at once just part o f the kind o f thing it is and an implicitly ethical injunction, warning Dasein against its tendency' to oblivion. S u ch equivocation is made possible by the vagueness o f such phrases as ‘ comprehending Being*, which are in one sense straightforwardly descriptive (understanding what things are) and in another sense loaded with a whole normative freight o f being enraptured by the mystery o f the world. Being itself is on the one hand just what is, but on the other hand contains its own evaluative distinctions and hierarchies: i f Being is to disclose itself*, H eidegger remarks in the Introduction to Metaphysics, ‘it m ust itself have and maintain a rank.*18 It is Being’s internal differentiation which determines the divisions between individual human beings as strong or weak, m asterful or

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open to being comm anded. Being, as H eidegger constantly stresses, is at once remote and near to hand: it is that to which only a fortunate elite are sum m oned, yet is as simple and self-evident as a pair o f sh o es or a wave o f the sea. Being is everywhere, which is its humble or ‘popular’ aspect, but it is so much everywhere that we constantly forget it, so that it becom es the most rare, fragile, obscure reality o f all. Hearkening to its imperious call is at once just part o f what we are and possible only by dint o f strenuous decision - a paradox implicit in the Heideggerian doctrine that we must actively allow things just to be themselves, resolutely liberate them into what they already are. It is as though Dasein s task is to be the energetic discloser and articulator that cancels itself at every moment and perm its the world to appear with the kind o f pristine splendour it would have had if we had not been there to perceive it. Dasein is thus granted a centrality with one hand only to be humbled with the other: it represents a sort o f violent intrusion into the sanctuary o f Being, but one absolutely essential for B ein g’s com ing to presence. T h e only way that Being can be disclosed is by something that also forgets and covers it up, so that the light o f human understanding continually darkens and impoverishes what it reveals, provides a place for this revelation to occur but - since it is always a partial, particular place - cannot help falsifying the very thing it brings to light. Being thus cannot b e near without also being rem ote, for Dasein is bound to distance and disfigure it in the very act o f unconcealing it. Falsehood is thus inherent in Being, but this is no ethical judgem ent. T o make falsehood intrinsic to B ein g is to make it simply part o f what Being factually is, and so ‘natural’ and unalarming. T h e dialectic o f travestying and unfolding is gathered into Being itself, which, as it were, puts out its own false appearance alongside its true essence in a ceaseless ironic rhythm. T h is relieves Dasein o f the guilt o f concealing Being, as well as underlining the sublime depth o f the latter. Being casts the shadow o f its own infinite plenitude over any particular gift o f itself to humanity, and so is reassuringly transcendent o f its actual incarnations. As H eidegger writes in The Question o f Being: ‘Properly considered, oblivion, the concealment o f the still unrevealed being (verbal) o f Being preserves untouched treasures and is the prom ise o f a find which is only waiting for the proper search.’19The ‘ falsity’ o f Being is thus a kind o f self-protective device on its part, a way o f aloofly withholding its riches at the very moment

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o f comm unicating them, rather as the Dasein o f Being and Time is already in the act o f moving beyond an object to its Being in the very m om ent o f cognizing it. B ein g is grandly disdainful o f its humble hum an servant yet wholly wrapped up in him; and in this way H eidegger can p ress to an extreme the decentring o f the human subject only partly achieved in his early work, while celebrating a preordained harmony between Being and humanity. Later H eideggerian M an is in one sense m ore decentred, in another sense more centred, than he was in the earlier writing. I f the ethical is thus dissolved away in the post-ArArr H eidegger, so is il in Being and Time. Dasein there may be mostly inauthentic, but it is proper and necessary that it should be so. ‘E rror is the space in which history unfolds*, writes H eidegger in the ‘Anaximander Fragm ent’;20 D asein s constant self-oblivious straying into the eveiyday world confronts it with just that essential weight o f facticity it must strive against in the struggle to becom e its own author. By deftly reckoning error into truth, fallenness into redem ption, Being and Time decon­ structs the antagonism between them and so protects itself at once from nihilism and hubris, despair and presum ption. T h e old self­ authoring subject has fallen on hard tim es, but is still alive and kicking. T o squander oneself in the world is a matter o f inauthenticity, bu t also a perfectly valid structure o f on e’s being. T h ere is an equivocation here once again between fact and value: Danseini ‘caring’ is in one sense the sheer fact o f its involvement with things, in another sen se a judgem ent on how dangerously liable it is to deviate from itself, and in a third sense an essential part o f its authentic resoluteness. Similarly, ‘authenticity* is clearly at one level a normative judgem ent, but as a question o f realizing one’s individual possibilities it is also no more than a kind o f becoming what one is. As an injunction, it urges one simply to be oneself, without any particular m oral directive, and so has the empty formalism o f all existentialist ethics. A s long as the possibilities one actualizes are one’s own inalienable property, it is apparently a m atter o f indifference what they consist in. H eidegger’s subject is thus the formal, abstract individual o f market society, drained o f ethical substance and left only with the notional ‘self* as a value. In the Introduction to Metaphysics, he is notably curt with any talk o f ‘values’: much o f what has been published on the topic, he remarks, is a distortion and dilution o f the ‘inner truth and greatness’ o f National Socialism . H is blurring o f fact

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and value is ideologically essential: by fudging the distinction he can cling to an elitism o f authenticity without openly committing him self to normative criteria, which would be to lapse back into the merely ‘subjectivist’ perspective he seeks to transcend. Every valuing, he writes in the Letter on Humanism , is a subjectivizing. Without some stron g implicit normativity there could be no critique o f the alienated world o f prattle and m ass opinion, not to mention o f science, dem ocracy, liberalism and socialism ; but for H eidegger’s work to have true authority it m ust go beyond m ere doxa to describe things as they really are, draw its title to speak from the very nature o f Being itse lf rather than sink into controvertible interpretations. It is in this sen se that a discourse o f what Dasein plainly and simply is operates at the sam e time as a rhetoric o f moral exhortation. T h e unspoken tragedy o f Being and Time is that there can be no transcendence without error, no freedom without its abuse. T h e movement by which Dasein moves beyond particular things to their Being is inseparable from the way it can slip restlessly, inauthentically, from this to that. T h is deadlock or aporia will later be violently resolved by grasping B ein g less as that from which humanity errs, than as that which errs from itself through humanity as part o f its own necessity. And this is ju st another way o f saying that there can be no ‘real* error at all. D eviating from the path is just a way o f following it, and the paths through a wood are in any case crooked. Technology is a spiritual disaster but also part o f Being’s own inscrutable dispensation. Values are petty subjective ornamentations on a Being which is secredy normative through and through. Freedom disrupts the old settled pieties o f earth, but nothing can escape such earth-boundness in any case, and all apparent freedom is bondage to Being. ‘B y virtue o f . . . reliability’, H eidegger writes in the Letter cm Humanism , ‘the peasant woman is m ade privy to the silent call o f the earth; by virtue o f the reliability o f the equipm ent she is sure o f her world.*21 In 1882, seven years before H eidegger’s birth, 42.5 per cent o f the G erm an people still m ade their living by agriculture, forestry and fishery, whereas only 35.5 per cent were engaged in industry, m ining and building. By 1895, when H eidegger was a small child, the latter occupations had already outstripped the former; and by 1907, when H eidegger was a student, 42.8 p er cent o f the Germ an population worked in industry and only 28.6 per cent on the land.22

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H eidegger’s early life, in brief, witnesses the decisive transition o f Germ any from a largely rural to a mainly industrial society. It is the period in which Germ any grew to becom e the leading industrial capitalist state in Europe, doubling its intem adonal trade between 1872 and 1900 and challenging Britain’s supremacy in world m arkets. By 1913 Germ any had overtaken Britain as a producer o f steel and pig iron, supplied three quarters o f the world’s synthetic dyes and surpassed all competitors in the export o f electrical equipm ent. U nder the protectionist and state-interventionist policies o f Bism arck, the G erm an economy had expanded rapidly in the latter decades o f the nineteenth century, despite periods o f depression and falling prices. Cartels and joint stock companies dominated economic life, and m ajor credit banks were key institutions in capital investment for industiy. Germ any grew remarkably in chemical products, shipbuilding and above all in its electrical industries; a Custom s U nion, a sound state-built communications infrastructure, draconian anti-socialist m easures and government stimulation o f commerce transform ed the face o f G erm an society in an astonishingly brief period o f time.23 By 1914, the country had joined the ranks o f the leading world traders and was expanding its overseas commerce more rapidly than any o f its rivals. H eidegger’s idyllic countryside was also being speedily reshaped: agriculture, swiftly expanding alongside industry, was being rationalized and scientifically remodelled, with the application o f new business and technical methods at its most intensive on the large estates. M eanwhile, beneath this flurry o f innovation, land remained parcelled into big and m edium -sized farm s, slighdy more than one fifth great estates and the rest the sm allholdings o f the peasantry. H eidegger’s sturdily independent small farmer was an untypical, increasingly marginalized phenomenon: peasants with paltry smallholdings often had little opportunity to eke out their m eagre livings through work for big landowners, and im ported farm labour seriously jeopardized the position o f the G erm an farm workers. T hey migrated, often enough, to the cities, to swell the ranks o f the industrial proletariat. Conditions there were frequently dire: long hours, low wages, unemployment and poor housing were the price the Germ an working class paid for the industrial capitalist boom. T h e state laid on social welfare, with an eye to w eaning the working class from the Social Dem ocrat party, then the largest socialist part)' in the world. In 1878 the Reichstag moved

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again st this p olitical threat, ban n in g the party and su p p re ssin g its n ew spapers. W hile H e id e g g e r w as ch erish in g his d ream s o f an ontologically correct p e asan try , G erm an y h ad em erged on the b a sis o f a political unity o f P ru ssia n Ju n k erd o m an d R hen ish capital into a new E m pire, the fu n d am en tal stru ctu re o f which w as distinctively capitalist. A new c la ss o f in d u strial nouveaux riches, n um berin g som e spectacularly wealthy in dividu als, sh o t the nation into the league o f th e five richest coun tries. Y et i f this cla ss w as settin g the pace o f econom ic developm en t, it wra s d o in g so u n d er the shadow o f the still pow erful old Prussian ruling class, gladly' em bracing its authoritarian suprem acy as an an tid o te to social unrest. T h e m ores and life-style o f the traditional Ju n k e r s provided a m odel for b o u rg eo is em ulation: w ealthy m erch an ts an d in du strialists asp ired in E n glish fashion to p o sse ss lan d ed e states an d m im ic the nobility. T h e nobility, for their part, w ere conning to recogn ize the industrial b o u rg eo isie as their own e con om ic b a se , an d the state w as e ag e r to prom ote its fortunes in ta riff and lab o u r p olicies. T h e new G erm an y , then, w as a capitalist social form ation , but on e deeply m arked by its feudal h eritage. T h e officer co rp s o f the arm y sw ore fealty directly to the E m p ero r, while the Im perial C h an cello r w as not respon sible to the Reichstag. B e m u se d by th is hybrid society, in which an autocratic traditionalist state form ed th e carap ace for industrial capitalist developm en t, the M arx o f the Critique o f the Gotha Programme threw a t it as many form u las a s h e could m uster: B ism arckian G erm an y w as ‘ nothing but a p o lic e -g u a rd e d m ilitary d esp o tism , em bellish ed with parliam entary fo rm s, alloyed with a feudal adm ixture, already in fluen ced by the bo u rg eo isie , fu rn ish ed by the bureaucracy . . .>u L e s s ambivalently, E n g els recogn ized that the new G erm an y , w hatever its political and cu ltural p ecu liarities, h ad joined the ranks o f the fully-fledged capitalist sta te s.2S T h e depth a n d virulence o f conservative reaction in the G erm an y o f Being and Time m ay be seen in large part a s a reaction to the peculiarly traum atic e m erg en ce o f industrial capitalism , sp ru n g as it w as so sw ifdy from the loins o f old-w orld P ru ssia. B u t such reaction w as a lso n u rtu red by the socially am orp h ous nature o f the society which had c o m e to birth - by the p ersisten ce within it o f stron g feudal elem en ts, the stu b b o rn survival o f ruralist id eologies a n d , m ost vitally, the fact that G e rm a n industrial capitalism had taken sh a p e partly as a

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sta te -sp o n so re d affair, without brin gin g with it a flou rish in g m iddlecla ss liberal tradition. B e fo re the w riting o f Being an d Time, G erm an y had also p a ss e d through h um iliating military c o n q u e st, social and econ om ic d evastation an d an abortive social revolution. W hereas N ie tz sch e, a t an earlier stage o f G e rm an capitalist developm en t, pits the im age o f a vigo rou s nobility again st an in ert bou rgeo isie, H e id e g g e r, at a later p h ase o f im perial expan sion an d technological dom in ation , tu rn s to the id ea o f Gelassenheit: o f a wisely passive ‘re le ase m e n t’ o f things, a vigilant, circu m sp ect refu sa] to m eddle with their bein g, o f which aesth etic experien ce ap p ears prototypical. T h is stan ce, w hich H e id e g g e r sh a re s with D . H . L aw ren ce , contain s a potent criticism o f En lighten m ent rationality: for all h is sen ten tiou s ruralism , H e id e g g e r h as m uch o f im portance to say ab o u t the violen ce o f m etaph ysical thought, and his sen se o f a m editative ‘being w ith’ th in gs, atten d in g responsively, n on -m asterin gly to their sh ap es an d te x tu res, finds a valuable ech o in som e con tem porary fem inist and e co lo g ical politics. In one se n s e , the p roblem o f su ch a perspective is that it red u ces both p olitics an d eth ics to ontology, an d so strikes th em em pty: the ph ilosoph y o f B ein g , o f a reverent o p e n n ess to things in their particularity, carrie s with it n o d irectives about how o n e is to ch oo se, act and d iscrim in ate. Ironically, it is therefore a s a b stra ct a s the very thought th at it o p p o se s, levellin g and h om ogenizin g in its turn. I f one sh ould allow trees to su b sist in their un ique m ode o f being, why not typhoid a s w ell? In an oth er sen se, this philosophy o f B e in g is far too con crete an d sp ecific for its own g oo d , exclu din g a n d discrim inating with its ow'n p ecu liar bran d o f violence: B e in g is a s internallydifferen tiated as the social rankings o f the fascistic sta te , an d in the 1 9 3 0 s c o m e s for a tim e to be incarnate in the Führer. H e id e g g e r sw ings with a m inim um o f m ediation betw een the nebulously on tological an d the sin isterly sp ecific; the distin ction betw een a con cern w ith B e in g an d a m ere p reoccu p ation with b ein gs, so the Introduction to Metaphysics su g g e sts, is the co n trast betw een the h istoric m issio n o f the G e rm an Volk an d the tech n ological positivism o f the U S A a n d the S o v ie t U nion. A s a way o f life, Gelassenheit is both K e atsian a n d craven - a fertile receptivity to ob jects o n the one hand, a crin g in g docility befo re the n um in ous pow er o f B e in g on the other. T h e h u b ristic h um anist su b je c t is properly d islo d g ed from its virile p re -e m in e n ce , but only to ad o p t the servile a cq u ie sc e n c e o f the

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lackey. H e id e g g e r ’s philosophy exem plifies one destin ation o f the idea o f the aesth etic in the twentieth century, a s a ruling class in grave crisis d isco v e red in the d isin terested n ess o f B e in g the very d isco u rse it re q u ires to m ystify its own ruthlessly instrum ental activity. T h e m ain cu rre n ts o f H e id e g g e r’s work can be highlighted by a co n trast with th e thought o f that oth er fascist sym pathizer, Paul de M an . H e id e g g e r never unequivocally recanted his N azi p ast; an d the reason why h e never recan ted w as p erh ap s b e c a u se he never repen ted. D e M an rem ain ed silen t about his own affiliations, to be expo sed only a fte r his death . It is p ossib le to read de M a n ’s post-w ar w ork a s an extrem e reaction again st the politics o f B ein g , elem en ts o f w hich he h im se lf h ad e sp o u se d in his n otorious early e ssa y s. In the later d e M an , all n otions o f lan gu age as replete with B e in g , o f sig n s as organically related to things, arc den oun ced a s p c m ic io u s m ystifica­ tions. H e id e g g e r ’s apocalyptic conception o f a teleological tim e b rim m in g w ith destiny is steadily d rain ed by de M an to the em pty, broken tem porality o f allegory. T ru th and authenticity, a s in H e id e g g e r’s wrork, are see n ineluctably to involve b lin d n ess and error, but a grow in g em p h asis on the latter is p ressed to a point o f bleakly d isillu sion ed scep ticism which th reaten s to rob the w hole co n cep t o f truth o f its p rod u ctiven ess. A rt is no lon ger the locu s o f truth and B ein g: its high privilege is rather to be the p lace w here an in erad icable e rro r an d delusion are finally able to n am e them selves for w hat they are, in a negative version o f H e id e gg e rian aesth etics. T h e su b ject, a s with the later H eid egger, is an effect o f lan guage; but this for d e M a n m ean s it is le ss a faithful ventriloquist o f B e in g than a v acu o u s fiction , the p ro d u ct o f a dup licitous rhetoric. All g rou n d s, unities, identities, transcendental significations and nostalgic yearnings for origin are ruthlessly un don e by the m ovem ent o f irony and the u n decid ab le. A ny hint o f m etaphorical organ icism , in self, history or sign , is u n d erm in ed by the blind, aleatory w orking o f a m echanistic m etonym y. In all o f th ese way, de M a n ’s later work c a n b e read a s a co n sisten t p olem ic again st the aesth etic, which h as now com e to e n c o m p ass all th eories o f a p urposive, m eaningful h istory; an d this p olem ic b le n d s well in its S to ic asceticism with an en d -o f-id eo lo gies era.26 T h e im p u lse behind d e M a n ’s various th eoretical hostilities is so in ten se a n d un rem ittin g that it is not difficult to d iscern in it a m ore than literary m otive.

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When philosophy turns positivist, the aesthetic is on hand to come to the rescue o f thought. T h e mighty them es evacuated by a reified, purely calculative rationality, now h ouseless and vagrant, seek for a r o o f under which to shelter, and discover orte in the discourse o f art. I f that discourse is now called upon to play the magisterial role which philosophy as such has abandoned - if it must return an answ er to the question o f the meaning o f existence, along with the question o f the significance o f art - then it must expand its horizon, up its own status and oust philosophy from its traditional sovereignty. It is thus that N ietzsche and H eidegger return over the heads o f M arx and H egel to Schelling, who held that philosophy had attained its acme in art. T h e m ore conventional thought seem s to d o no more than reflect an alienated social existence, the more urgently, and desperately, this flight from reason to poetry gathers force. But if such a recourse m arks the true limits o f a debased rationality, it also suggests, most evidently with H eidegger, the solace which in an increasingly opaque social order a disinherited group o f ideologues may find in a few apodictic truths, rooted in an ontology so profound as to be ultimately ineffable, and thus incontrovertible. T h e appeal to Being, like the m oral sense o f British Enlightenment theory, is at once a confession o f intellectual bankruptcy and a rhetorically powerful affair. It is unutterably more fundamental and self-evident than orthodox philosophical thought, returning us relievedly to that which, beyond all social complexity and conceptual obfuscation, we feel we simply know\ yet it admits us in the sam e gesture to the inner sanctum o f the sag es, whose insight is rare enough to penetrate through every routinized discourse o f rationality to what really matters. Being, in a fam iliar Zen paradox, is at once tantalizingly elusive and absolutely self-evident; only a pious peasant or mandarin professor could possibly grasp it. Like the Wittgenstein with whom he has often been com pared, H eidegger returns us exacdy to where we are, leaving the whole structure o f everydayness comfortingly in place, but allows us to do so in the flattering knowledge that we are consequently in on the deepest conceivable mystery. I f H eidegger is able to dism iss the aesthetic, it is only because he has in effect universalized it, transgressing the frontiers between art and existence in a reactionary parody o f the avant garde. Liberated from its specialized enclave, the aesthetic can now be spread over the whole o f reality: art is what brings things to be in their essential truth,

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and so is identical with the very movement o f Being. Art, H eidegger claim s in his lectures on Nietzsche, m ust be conceived o f as the basic happening o f beings, as the authentically creative movement. Poetry, art, language, truth, thought and Being thus converge in his later work into a single reality: Being is the upholder o f beings, language the essence o f Being, and poetry the essence o f language. Each dimension shines with radiant immediacy through the other: language, which like poetry speaks only itself, nevertheless discloses the unm ediated truth o f Being in that very act. T h e aesthetic for H eid egger is less a question o f art than a way o f relating to the world a relation which fatalistically accepts even the ‘untruth* o f that world as a gracious dispensation o f Being, and which leaves the human subject rapt in paralytic reverence before a num inous presence which the concept would only defile. I f a respectful communion with Being, disowning all thought o f dom ination, might appear to be stereotypically ‘feminine’, Being itself in H eidegger would seem exactly the opposite. It appears in his writing in many guises: it is N othingness, a pair o f peasant shoes, the pure movement o f temporality; as that higher destiny which sum m ons the folk implacably to self-sacrifice, it w ears for a while the features o f A d o lf H itler.27 Yet buried beneath all o f these im ages is a more ancient, uncannily familiar one, at once infinitely remote and intimately close. In the Introduction to Metaphysics, H eidegger argues that particular objects were seen by the ancient G reeks as a kind o f ‘falling away’ from an originary fullness o f Being, a ‘tipping over* which contrasts with Being’s own steadfast ‘uprightness*. T h e G reek physis, so he claim s, originally meant a ‘standing forth* or ‘com ing to stand*, that which unfolds, blossom s or arises. Being is a kind o f ‘jutting forth*, and this uprightness or ‘erect standing there’ is a perm anent one, an unfolding which will never fall down. It would seem that this oldest o f all stand-bys is indeed always ready-to-hand.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York, 1966), p. 66. 2 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (London, 1981), p. 109. 3 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem o f Metaphysics (Bloomington, 1962), p . 138.

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4 The phrase is William J. Richardson’s, in what is still the most magisterial study of Heidegger: Martin Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, 1963). Other relevant studies of Heidegger include J. L. Metha, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York, 1971); Laszlo Versenyi, Heidegger, Being and Truth (New Haven, 1965); L. M. Vail, Heidegger and Ontological Difference (Pennsylvania, 1972); Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modem Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven, 1978); William V. Spanos (ed.), Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature (Bloomington, 1979). 5 See Joseph P. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York, 1979), especially chapters 6 and 7. 6 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism*, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York, 1977), p. 216. 7 See for example ‘What are Poets for?’ and ‘The Thing’, in Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, translated and introduced by Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971). 8 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (New York, 1969), p. 35. 9 Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, p. 338. 10 Ibid., p. 335. 11 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon ofAuthenticity (London, 1986), p. 93. 12 See for example Heidegger, ‘Language*, in Poetry, Language, Thought, and On the Way to Language (New York, 1971). For a useful essay on Heidegger and language see Donald G. Marshall, ‘The Ontology of the Literary Sign: Notes towards a Heideggerian Revision o f Semiology’, in Spanos (ed.), Martin Heidegger and the jQuestion of Literature. 13 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art*, in Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, p. 185. 14 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, 1959), p. 171. 15 Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue on Language*, in On the Way to Language. 16 Heidegger, TheJargon of Authenticity, p. 54. 17 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism*, in Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, p. 236. 18 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 133. 19 Heidegger, The Question of Being (London, 1959), p. 91. 20 Heidegger, ‘The Anaximander Fragment’, in Early Greek Thinking (New York, 1975), p. 26. 21 Kxell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, p. 164. 22 See Hajo Holbom, A History ofModem Germany 1840-1945 (Princeton, 1982), p. 370. 23 See W. O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power 1834-1914 (London, 1975), pp. 173ff.

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24 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme*, in Marx and Engels: Selected Works (London, 1968), p. 332 (translation slightly amended). 25 F. Engels, The Role of Force in History (London, 1968), pp. 64-5. 26 See my comments on de Man, the so-called Yale school o f dcconstruction and the second world war in The Function of Criticism (London, 1984), pp. 100-1. 27 For two instructive studies of Heidegger’s Nazism, see Pierre Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris, 1975), and Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazism (Paris, 1987).

12

The M arxist Rabbi: Walter Benjamin T li ere are intricate relations between myth, modernism and monopoly capital. Suppressed by the varieties o f Victorian rationalism during the epoch o f liberal capitalism, myth stages its dramatic re-entiy into European culture, with Nietzsche as one o f its prophetic precursors, at the point o f that capitalism’s gradual mutation into ‘higher* corporate forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I f a laissez-faire economy is now moving into more systemic m odes, then there is som ething peculiarly apposite about the rebirth o f myth - itself, as L évi-Strau ss has taught us, a highly organized ‘rational* system - as an imaginative means o f deciphering this new social experience. Such mythological thought belongs with a radical shift in the whole category o f the subject - a rethinking which involves Ferdinand de Sau ssure as much as Wyndham Lewis, Freud and M artin H eidegger as well as D . H. Law rence and Virginia Woolf. F o r it is really no longer possible to pretend, given the transition from market to monopoly capitalism, that the old vigorously individualist ego, the self-determ ining subject o f classical liberal thought, is any longer an adequate model for the subject’s new experience o f itself under these altered social conditions. T h e m odem subject, much like the mythological one, is less the sharply individuated source o f its own actions than an obedient function o f som e deeper controlling structure, which now appears more and m ore to do its thinking and acting for it. It is no accident that the theoretical current known as structuralism has its origins in the epoch o f m odernism and monopoly capital - that this period w itnesses a turning away on all sides from the traditional philosophy o f the subject o f Kant, Hegel and the younger M arx, troubledly conscious as it is o f the individual as

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constituted to its roots by forces and processes utterly opaque to everyday consciousness. Whether one nam es such implacable powers L an gu age or Being, Capital or the Unconscious, Tradition or the élan v ital Archetypes or the Destiny o f the W est, their effect is to open up a well-nigh unspannable gu lf between the waking life o f the old befeathered ego and the true determinants o f its identity, which are always covert and inscrutable. I f the subjcct is accordingly fractured and dism anded, the objective world it confronts is now quite impossible to grasp as the product o f the subject’s own activity. What stands over against this individual is a self-regulative system which appears on the one hand thoroughly rationalized, eminently logical in its minutest operations, yet on the other hand blankly indifferent o f the rational projects o f human subjects themselves. T h is autonom ous, self-determ ining artefact o f a world then rapidly takes on all the appearances o f a second nature, erasin g its own source in human practice so as to seem as selfevidendy given and immobilized as those rocks, trees and mountains which are the stu ff o f mythology. I f myth is a matter o f eternal recurrence, then the recurrence which m atters m ost in the sphere o f monopoly capitalism is the eternal return o f the commodity. Capitalism indeed has a history; but the dynamic o f that development, as M arx ironically noted, is the perpetual recreation o f its own ‘eternal* structure. Each act o f comm odity exchange is at once uniquely differentiated and a m onotonous replaying o f the sam e old story. T h e epitome o f the com m odity is thus the cult o f fashion, in which the familiar returns with som e slight variation, the very old and the very new caught up together in som e oxymoronic logic o f identity-in-difference. It is a paradox o f m odernism that its exhilarated sen se o f fresh technological possibilities (Futurism , Constructivism, Surrealism ) finds itself constandy displaced into som e static, cyclical world in which all dynamic process seem s permanently arrested. C oupled with this is an equally paradoxical interplay o f chance and necessity. From one viewpoint, every continent bit o f experience now seem s secredy regulated by som e underlying structure or subtext (in the case o f Ja m es Jo yce’s Ulysses, the subtext o f Hom eric myth) o f which experience itself is the m anipulated product. Reality is coded to its roots, as the ephemeral working through o f som e deeper logic invisible to the naked eye, and randomness is accordingly banished. Yet these determining structures

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are now so thoroughly formal and abstract in their operations that they seem to stand at an immense distance from the realm o f sensuous immediacy, superbly autonomous o f the chance combinations o f matter that they throw up; and to this extent the world remains fragmentary and chaotic on its surfaces, a set o f fortuitous conjunc­ tures for which the archetypal image is the two-second encounter at som e busy urban cross-roads. T h is is surely the case with Finnegans Wake, a text which offers a minimum o f mediation between its local units o f signification and the mighty Viconian cycles which generate and enclose them. It is not difficult to perceive a similar dislocation o f abstract structure and perversely idiosyncratic particular in Saussure’s celebrated distinction between langue - the universal categories o f language it s e lf - and the apparently random , unformalizable nature o f parole or everyday speech. In a strange reversal or regression o f historical time, capitalism ’s ‘higher’ stages would thus seem to return it to the pre-industrial world it has left behind - to a closed, cyclical, naturalized sphere o f relentless fatality, o f which myth is one appropriate figuration. M ythological thought is commonly associated with season-based, traditional, pre-industrial society, and historical consciousness with urban culture; but one has only to com pare the work o f Yeats and Joyce to see how beautifully this contrast doesn’t work. F o r both are o f course deeply mythological writers, in an age when the most primitive and the m ost sophisticated have somehow coalesced. Indeed this is a stock formula o f m odernism , whether in the shape o f that atavistic avant-gardist who is Eliot’s ideal poet, the role o f archaic m aterials in art or psychoanalysis, or the uncanny double process by which Baudelaire, in Walter Benjam in’s eso teric reading o f him, finds h im self geologically excavating the ancient in his restless hunt for the new. T h is ‘ neverchanging everchanging’ world, as Ulysses has it, is one in which space seem s both fragmentary and hom ogeneous; and this is the appropriate space o f the commodity, the fragment o f matter which levels all phenomena to a common identity. T h e allegorical signifier, Benjamin remarks, returns in the m odem epoch as the comm odity;1 and one might claim that it is as the mythological signifier that it returns in the work o f Joycc. I f myth is thus symptomatic o f a reified social condition, it is also a

convenient instrument for making sense of it. The steady draining of immanent meaning from objects clears the way for some marvellous

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new totalization, so that in a world depleted o f significance and subjectivity, myth can furnish just those ordering, reductive schem as necessary to elicit unity from chaos. It thus takes over som ething o f the traditional role o f historical explanation at a point where historical form s o f thought are now themselves increasingly part o f the symbolic rubble, progressively hollow and discredited in the aftermath o f im perialist world war. Yet if myth for a T .S . Eliot discloses som e given pattern in reality, this is precisely not the case for Lévi-Strau ss - nor for Ja m es Joyce, whose texts are comically aware o f the arbitrariness o f the allegorical signifier, and who knows that a day in D ublin m ust be made to mean the w anderings o f Odysseus, wrenched into it by hermeneutical violence in the absence o f any immanent correspondences between the two. Like the commodity, Jo yce’s writing will seize on any old content in order to perpetuate itself. T h e early decades o f the twentieth century witness a search for ever m ore formalized m odels o f social explanation, from structural linguistics and psychoanalysis to W ittgenstein’s Tractatus and the H usserlian eidos; but these are in tension with an anxious turning back to ‘ the things themselves*, whether in this alternative dimension o f H usserlian phenomenology or in that romantic pursuit o f the irreducibly ‘lived* which sweeps from G erm an Lebensphilosophie to em erge somewhere in the doctrines o f Scrutiny. Perhaps, then, it is myth which can provide the m issing m ediations between the over­ form alized on the one hand and the myopically particular on the other, between that which threatens to elude language in its abstract universality and that which slips through the net o f discourse in its ine(Table uniqueness. Myth would then figure as a return o f the R om antic symbol, a reinvcntion o f the Hegelian ‘concrete universal* in which every phenomenon is secretly inscribed by a universal law, and any time, place or identity pregnant with the burden o f the cosmic whole. I f this can be achieved, then a history in crisis might once m ore be rendered stable and significant, reconstituted as a set o f hierarchical planes and correspondences. T h is, however, is more easily said than done. It is true that a novel like Ulysses, in which every apparendy random particular opens m icrocosm ically into som e portentous universal, might be seen in one sen se as standard H egelian stuff. But this would surely be to overlook the enorm ous irony with which this is accomplished - the way in which this paranoid totality gestures to its own artifice in its very

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pokerfaced exhaustiveness. T h e sweated Flaubertian labour needed to bring o ff such a tour deforce, a labour kept steadily before our gaze, betrays the fictive or im possible nature o f the whole enterprise and contains the seed s o f its own dissolution. F o r if a world o f intricate symbolic correspondences is to be constructed, som e kind o f m echanism or switch-gear will be necessary by which any one elem ent o f reality can becom e a signifier o f another; and there is clearly no natural stopping place to this play o f allegorical signification, this endless metamorphosis in which anything can be alchemically converted into anything else. T h e symbolic system, in short, carries within it the forces o f its own deconstruction - which is to say in a different idiom that it operates very much by the logic o f that commodity form which is partly responsible for the chaos it hopes to transcend. It is the commodity form which at once fashions som e spurious identity between disparate objects and generates an unstable, open-ended flux which threatens to outrun all such scrupulously im posed symmetry. I f a day in Dublin can be made meaningful through its allegorical alliance with a classical text, could not the sam e be equally done for a day in Barnsley or the Bronx? T h e textual strategies which invest a particular time or place with unwonted centrality, ridding it o f its random ness and contingency, do so only to return the whole o f that contingency to it. In this sense the complim ent which Joyce pays to Ireland, in inscribing it so unforgettably on the international map, is o f a distinctly backhanded kind. T o privilege any particular experience, you must refer it to a structure which is always elsewhere; but this equivalencing o f the two realm s in question is enough to rob both o f them o f their distinctiveness. Allegory is in this sense symbolism run riot, pressed to a self-undoing extreme; if anything can now fulfil the role o f a ‘concrete universal*, nothing is particularly remarkable. I f anywhere is everywhere, then you can scribble away in T rieste without ever having left Dublin. M odernism , as Raymond Williams h as argued, is among other things a running battle between a new m ode o f rootless, cosmopolitan consciousness and the older, more parochial national traditions from which this consciousness has defiantly broken loose.2 T h e vibrant m odernist metropolis is the cultural node o f a now thoroughly global capitalist system, and is in the process o f both relinquishing and reinterpreting from a distance the national enclaves within which capitalist production has tradition­

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ally flourished. Ireland or Britain will thus com e to figure as no more than random regional instantiations o f an autonom ous international nework, whose economic operations traverse particular cultures as indifferently as ‘deep structures’ cut across distinct languages, literary' texts or individual egos. T h e deracinated fate o f the m odernist exiles and ém igrés is a material condition for the emergence o f a newly formalizing, universalizing thought, one which having spum ed the am biguous comforts o f a motherland can now cast a bleak analytic eye, from its ‘transcendental’ vantage-point in som e polyglot metrop­ olis, on all such specific historical legacies, discerning the hidden global logics by which they arc governed. T h e modernists, as Sean G olden has suggested, were never greatly ham strung by those vested psychological interests in a specific national culture which mark a m ore provincial art;3 instead, they could approach such indigenous traditions from the outside, estrange and appropriate them for their own devious ends, roam in the m anner o f a Joyce, Pound or Eliot across a whole span o f cultures in euphoric, melancholic liberation from the Oedipal constraints o f a mother tongue. I f this powerfully alienating perspective on traditionalist pieties is one source o f m odernism ’s radical impact, it also betrays well enough its reluctant complicity with the world o f international capitalist production, which is quite as nation-blind as The Waste Land or the Cantos and has the sam e scant respect for regional idiosyncrasy. T o spring like Joyce or Beckett from a chronically backward colonial society was to this extent to turn political oppression to artistic advantage: if you had little enough rich national heritage in the first place, having been systematically deprived o f it by the British, then you figured already as a kind o f non-place and non-identity and could thus find yourself unpredictably catapulted from margins to centre, offering in your peripherality an ironic préfiguration o f the destiny that would now befall even the m ost advanced national capitalist formations. Bereft o f a stable, continuous cultural tradition, the colonized were forced to make it up as they went along; and it is exactly this effect o f political dispossession which Joyce, Beckett and Flann O ’Brien will put to subversive m odernist use. T h e pre-industrial - Ireland as a stagnant agrarian province - thus enters into a dramatic new constellation with the m ost developed, as ‘primitive* and sophisticated once more commingle in the modernist sensibility. I f Dublin is now the capital o f the world, it is in part

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because the life-rhythms o f such a parochial spot, with its set routines, recurrent habits and sense o f inert enclosure, are coming to seem exemplary o f the shrunken, self-sustaining, repetitive sphere o f monopoly capitalism itself. T h e sealed circuits o f the one reflect, microcosmically, those o f the other. M odernism and colonialism becom e strange bedfellows, not least because the liberal realist doctrines from which m odernism breaks free were never quite so plausible and entrenched on the colonial edges as they were in the metropolitan centres. F o r the subjugated subjects o f empire, the individual is less the strenuously self-fashioning agent o f its own historical destiny than empty, powerless, without a name; there can be little o f the m ajor realists’ trust in the beneficence o f linear time, which is always on the side o f C aesar. Languishing within a barren social reality, the colonized subject may beat the kind o f retreat into fantasy and hallucination which lends itse lf more evidently to m odernist than to realist literary practice. And if the traditional national languages are now encountering global semiotic systems, cherished cultural heritages yielding ground to avant-garde tech­ n iques which are easily portable across national frontiers, who better placed to speak this new non-speech than those already disinherited in their own tongue? F o r Joyce, then, the future lies not so much with thwarted Rom antic intellectuals still ambivalently in thrall to a national heritage, as with faceless advertising agents o f mixed nationhood and little dom estic stability who can be at hom e anywhere because anywhere is everywhere. But if Leopold Bloom signifies in this sense the ‘good’ side o f international capitalism, with its impatience o f all chauvinism and provincialism, its dem ocratic scorn for the hieratic and elitist, his vague humanitarian creed o f universal brotherhood also bears witness to the impotent universalism o f the bourgeois public sphere. Bloom is at once sunk in gross particularism and too abstractly cosmopolitan; and to this extent h e reproduces in his own person the contradiction between form and content which pertains to the com m odities he peddles. Such, at least, would be the view o f a G e o rg Lukâcs, for whom the commodity form is the secret villain o f this m odem scenario in which abstract and concrete have been riven apart. History and Class Consciousness depicts a fallen world in which, under the sway o f exchange-value, ‘reality disintegrates into a m ultitude o f irrational facts and over these a network o f purely

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“ fo rm al” law s em ptied o f con tent is ca st.’4 It is a reason able d escrip tio n o f Ulysses, or for that m atter o f m uch m o d ern ist art, o f which T h e o d o r A d orn o co m m en ts that its form al relation s are as ab stract a s the real relation s betw een individuals in b ourgeois society.5 T h e com m odity, itse lf a kind o f em b odied h iatu s betw een u se-valu e an d exch an ge-valu e, se n su o u s content an d un iversal form , is for L u k â c s the so u rce o f all th ese disablin g an tim on ies betw een gen eral an d p articu lar. T h e b o u rg eo isie is on the one h an d ‘held fast in the m ire o f im m ediacy’,6 but su b jected on the oth er hand to the dom in ion o f iron law s with all the naturalized fatality o f the w orld o f myth. T h e h um an su b je c t is at once em pirical p articu lar and abstract tran scen d en ce, ph en om en ally determ in ed but spiritually free. In such h istorical co n d itio n s, su b ject and object, form and con tent, sen se and spirit, are bro ken a su n d er; and the breath takin g p roject o f the central section o f H istory and Class Consciousness is to fasten upon these co m m o n p lace topoi o f idealist philosophy and think them through again , this tim e in the tran sfigurin g light o f the com m odity form which for L u k â c s im prints that idealism in its every asp e ct but to which it is n ecessarily blinded. T h e r e are tw o p o ssib le solu tion s to this historical situation. O n e is socialism , w hich figured in E astern E u ro p e as the S talin ism for which L u k â c s b e cam e from tim e to tim e an am b igu o u s ap ologist. T h e other, som ew h at le s s taxing solution is the aesth etic, w hich for L u k â cs e m e rg ed into existen ce as a strategic resp on se to the dilem m as he sk etch es. In the eighteenth century, the stark polarities o f early b o u rg eo is society co n ferre d Upon aesth etics and upon consciousness o f art a p h ilosop h ical im portan ce that art w as unable to lay claim to in p rev io u s ag e s. T h is d o e s not m ean that a rt itse lf w as exp e rie n cin g an u n p reced en ted golden a g e . O n the con trary, with a very few exceptions the actual artistic p ro d u ctio n d u rin g this period can n ot be rem otely co m p a re d to that o f p ast gold en ages. W hat is cru cia l here is the th eoretical an d ph ilosoph ical im portance w hich the principle o f art a cq u ire d in this p erio d .7 T h is p rin cip le, so L u k a c s claim s, involves ‘ the creation o f a con crete totality that sp rin g s from a con ception o f form orien tated tow ards the

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concrctc content o f its material substratum . In this view form is therefore able to demolish the “ contingent” relation o f the parts to the whole and to resolve the merely apparent opposition between chance and necessity.*8 T h e work o f an , in short, com es to the rescue o f a commodified existence, equipped with everything in which the commodity’ is so lamentably lacking - a form no longer indifferent to its content but indissociable from it; an objectifying o f the subjective which entails enrichment rather than estrangem ent; a deconstruction o f the antithesis between freedom and necessity, as each element o f the artefact appears at once miraculously autonom ous yet cunningly subordinated to the law o f the whole. In the absence o f socialism, then, it will prove necessary to make do with art. Ju st as aesthetics itself provided for early bourgeois society an imaginary resolution o f real contradictions, so as the grip o f Stalinism tightens Lukâcs is constrained to discover in art that concrete totality which a society o f labour cam ps looks increasingly unlikely to deliver. It is thus that he prom ulgates his celebrated doctrine o f realism, as a kind o f dialecticized version o f the Romantic ideology o f the symbol. In the all-round, many-sided, harmonious totality' o f the realist work, individual particulars are entirely mediated through the structure o f the whole, sublated to the ‘typical* or universal with no detriment to their sen suous specificity. In his later aesthetic theory, Lukâcs will cite as the central category' o f the aesthetic the notion o f Besonderheit or speciality, that which seamlessly m ediates between individual and totality by inhering simultaneously in both.9 F o r him, as for a long tradition o f Romantic idealism, art signifies that privileged place where the concrete phenomena, while posing as no more than themselves, are surreptitiously recreated in the image o f their universal truth. In speaking simply o f itself, jealously preserving its self-identity, each facet o f the artwork cannot help transmitting a lateral m essage about all o f the others. Works o f realism know the truth, but pretend in a crafty act o f prestidigitation that they do not: the work must first o f all abstract the essence o f the real, then conceal this essence by recreating it in all o f its supposed immediacy. T h e realist artefact is thus a kind o f tromp Voeil, a surface which is also a depth, a regulative law everywhere absolute yet nowhere visible. T h e richly specified elem ents o f the text are at once equivalent to and less than the totality which constitutes them; and the price which these elements m ust pay for their privileged

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m ediation through the whole is the loss o f any real power to react critically upon it. L u k âcs’s aesthetics, in other words, are a left m irror-image o f the dom inant m odel o f bourgeois aesthetics whose fortunes and m isfor­ tunes we have charted through this study. Lukâcsian realism lends a M arxist inflection to that imbrication o f law and freedom , whole and part, spirit and sense, which plays so vital a role in the construction o f m iddle-class hegemony. Spontaneously inscribed by the law o f the whole, the minute particulars o f the realist artefact dance together in consort according to som e self-effacing principle o f unity. It is as though Lukâcs, having tracked the em barrassm ents o f bourgeois society to their material roots in a style quite at odds with that society’s own self-reflection, then turns and advances much the same solutions to these difficulties. It is true that for him the relations between part and whole are always subtly m ediated, never a matter o f som e intuited coalescence; but it is nevertheless remarkable that one with his formidable powers o f historical materialist analysis should com e up with an aesthetics which in broad oudine faithfully reproduces som e o f the key structures o f bourgeois political power. I f this is remarkable, it is not perhaps all that surprising. It belongs to L u k âcs’s critique o f both Stalinism and leftist avant-gardism to invoke the wealth o f the bourgeois humanist legacy, overvaluing the undoubted continuity between that heritage and a socialist future; and the Romantic roots o f his own brand o f M arxism lead him often enough to ignore the more progressive dim ensions o f capitalism, including the need for an aesthetics which has learnt from the commodity form rather than lapsed back into som e nostalgic totality before it ever was. T o say this is not to deny the admirable force and fertility o f the Lukacsian theory o f realism , which represents an invaluable contribution to the canon o f M arxist criticism, and which a m odernist M arxism has unjustly dem eaned; but L u kacs’s failure to take M arx’s point that history progresses by its bad side nevertheless constitutes a serious limitation to his thought. W alter Benjam in, by contrast, p resses M arx’s dictum to a parodie extrem e. H is M essianic reading o f history forbids him any faith in secular redemption, dismantles all teleological hope, and in an astonishingly bold dialectical stroke locates the signs o f salvation in the very unregeneracy o f historical life, in its postlapsarian suffering

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and squalor. T h e more history presents itself as mortified and devalued, as in the sluggish, spiritually bankrupt world o f the Germ an Trauerspiel\ the more it becom es a negative index o f some utterly inconceivable transcendence waiting patiently in the wings. T im e in such conditions is folded back into space, dwindled to a repetition so agonizingly empty that som e salvific epiphany might just be imagined to tremble on its brink. T h e profane order o f a corrupt politics is a kind o f negative imprint o f M essianic time, which will finally emerge into its own on the day o f judgem ent not from the womb o f history but from its ruins. T h e very transitoriness o f a history in pieces anticipates its own ultimate passing away, so that for Benjam in the ghostly traces o f paradise can be detected in its sheer antithesis - in that endless series o f catastrophes which is secular temporality, the storm blowing from heaven to which som e give the name o f progress. At the nadir o f historical fortunes, in a social order grown morbid and m eaningless, the figure o f the just society can be glimmeringly discerned, by a heterodox hermeneutics for which the death’s head is transfigured into an angelic countenance. Only such a negative political theology' can stay true to the Ju d aic Bilderverbot which prohibits all graven im ages o f future reconciliation, including those im ages known as art. Only the fragmentary work o f art, that which refuses the lures o f the aesthetic, o f Schein and symbolic totality, can hope to figure forth truth and justice by remaining resolutely silent about them, foregrounding in their place the unredeem ed torment o f secular time. L u kâcs opposes the artefact to the commodity'; Benjamin, in another feat o f dialectical im pudence, conjures a revolutionary aesthetics from the commodity' form itself. T h e blank, petrified objects o f Trauerspiel have undergone a kind o f leakage o f meaning, an unhinging o f signifier and signified, in a world which like that o f commodity production knows only the empty, homogeneous time o f eternal repetition. T h e features o f this inert, atomized landscape then have to suffer a kind o f secondary' reification at the hands o f the allegorical sign, itself a dead letter or piece o f lifeless script. But once all intrinsic meaning has haemorrhaged from the object, in a collapse o f the expressive totality' which Lukacs espouses, any phenomenon can come by the wily resourcefulness o f the allegorist to signify absolutely anything else, in a kind of profane parody o f the creative nam ing o f G o d . Allegory thus mimes the levelling, equivalencing

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operations o f the commodity but thereby releases a fresh polyvalence o f m eaning, as the allegorist grubs among the ruins o f once integral m eanings to permutate them in startling new ways. Once purged o f all mystifying immanence, the allegorical referent can be redeem ed into a multiplicity o f uses, read against the grain and scandalously reinterpreted in the manner o f K abbala. T h e inherent sense which ebbs from the object under the allegorist’s melancholy gaze leaves it an arbitrary material signifier, a rune or fragment retrieved from the clutches o f some univocal significance and surrendered unconditionally into the allegorises power. Such objects have already come loose from their contexts, and so can be plucked from their environs and woven together in a set o f estranging correspondences. Benjamin is already familiar with this technique from Kabbalistic interpretation, and will later find resonances o f it in the practice o f the avant-garde, in m ontage, surrealism , dream imagery and epic theatre, as well as in the epiphanies o f Proustian memory, the symbolic affinities o f Baudelaire and his own obsessional habit o f collecting. T h ere is also a seed o f inspiration here for his later doctrine o f mechanical reproduction, in which the very technology which breeds alienation, given a dialectical twist, can strip cultural products o f their intimidatory aura and refunction them in productive ways. L ike the commodity, the meaning o f the allegorical object is always elsewhere, eccentric to its material being; bu t the more polyvalent it becom es, the more supple and inventive grows its forensic power o f deciphering the real. T h e allegorical signifier shares in a sense in the frozen world o f myth, whose compulsive repetitions foreshadow Benjam in’s later im age o f an historicism for which all time is hom ogeneous; but it is also a force to break open this fetishized realm , inscribing its own network o f ‘magical* affinities across the face o f an inscrutable history. Later in Benham in’s work, this will take the form o f the dialectical image, the shocking confrontation in which tim e is arrested to a compact monad, spatialized to a shimmering field o f force, so that the political present m ay redeem an endangered m om ent o f the past by wrenching it into illuminating correspondence with itself. T h e problem o f Benjam in’s project, as Jü rgen H aberm as h as pointed out, is to restore the possibility o f such symbolic correlations while liquidating that world o f natural mythology o f which they form a part.10 Neither the ‘natural* totalizing o f the sym bol, nor the mere consecration o f linear repetition, is an

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accep table strategy. M ech an ical reproduction rejects both the unique d ifferen ce o f the aura an d the en d le ss self-id en tities o f m yth; in levelling arte facts to a sam e n ess subversive o f the form er, it frees them fo r distin ctive functions repugnan t to the latter. T h e s e d ialectical im ages are an instance o f what B en jam in calls a ‘co n stellation ’, a m otif w hich runs from the first few p a g e s of his book on Trauerspiel to the posth um ously pub lish ed ‘T h e s e s on the P h ilosoph y o f H istory’ . In the ideal critical m eth od, he w rites, id eas are not rep resen ted in th em selves, b u t solely and exclusively in an arran gem en t o f con crete elem en ts in the co n cep t: as the configuration o f th ese elem en ts . . . Id eas arc to ob je cts as con stellation s are to stars. T h is m ean s, in the first p lace, that they are neither their co n cep ts nor their laws . . . It is the function o f con cepts to group ph en om en a togeth er, an d the division which is brough t ab o u t within them thanks to the distin gu ish in g pow er o f th e intellect is all the m ore significan t in that it brin gs about tw o things at a sin gle strok e: the salvation o f p h en o m en a and the represen tation o f id e a s ." T h e id ea is not w hat lies behind the ph en om en on a s som e inform ing essen ce, b u t the way the object is conceptually co n figu rated in its diverse, extrem e and contradictory elem ents. B e n ja m in ’s dream is o f a form o f criticism so tenaciously im m anent that it w ould rem ain entirely im m erse d in its object. T h e truth o f that ob ject w ould be disclo sed n ot by referrin g it in rationalist style to a govern in g general idea, bu t by d ism an tlin g its com pon en t elem ents through the pow er o f m inutely p articu lar co n cep ts, then recon figu ratin g them in a pattern w hich red eem ed the th in g’s m eaning an d value without ce asin g to ad h ere to it. ‘ P h en o m en a’, he w rites, ‘d o not, however, enter into th e realm o f id eas w hole, in their cru de em pirical state, ad ulterated by ap p earan ces, but only in their basic elem ents, red eem ed . T h e y are divested o f their false unity so that, thus divided, they m ight partake o f the genuine unity o f truth.’ 12 T h e thing m ust not be g ra sp e d as a m ere instantiation o f som e un iversal essen ce; instead, th ought m u st deploy a w hole clu ster o f stubbornly specific con cep ts w hich in C u b ist style refract the ob ject in m yriad direction s or p en etrate it from a range o f d iffu se an gles. In this way, the

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ph en om en al sp h e re is itse lf p e rsu a d e d to yield up a kind o f noum enal truth, a s th e m icro sco p ic gaze estran g es the everyday into the rem ark ab le.13 A co n stellato ry epistem ology sets its face again st the C artesian or K an tian m om en t o f subjectivity, le ss con cern ed to ‘p o s s e s s ’ the p h en om en on than to liberate it into its own se n su o u s b e in g and p reserve its d isp a rate elem en ts in all their irreducible heterogeneity. T h e K a n tia n division o f em pirical an d intelligible is th us tran ­ sce n d e d ; and this is the only way o f doin g m eth odological ju stice to a th in g’s d a m a g e d , su p p re sse d m ateriality, salvaging w hat A dorn o calls ‘ the w aste p ro d u c ts an d blind sp ots which have esca p e d the dialectic’ from the in exorable ironing out o f the abstract id e a .14 T h e con stellation re fu se s to clinch itse lf on som e m etaphysical essen ce, leaving its co m p o n en t p arts loosely articulated in the m an ner o f Trauerspiel o r ep ic theatre; but it nevertheless p refigu res that state o f reconciliation which it w ould be both b lasp h em o u s an d politically co u n terp rod u ctiv e to represen t directly. In its unity o f the perceptual and co n cep tu al, its transm utation o f thoughts into im ages, it b ears a strain o f that b lissfu l E d en ic condition in which w ord a n d ob ject w ere sp o n tan eo u sly at on e, a s well a s o f that preh istoric, m im etic co rre sp o n d e n c e betw een N atu re an d hum anity which p re-d ated ou r fall into cogn itive reason. T h e B en jam in ian notion o f constellation is itself, o n e m ight claim , a con stellation all o f its own, rich in theoretical allu sion s. I f it points b ack to K a b b a la , the L eibn izian m onad and H u sse rl’s return to the p h en o m en a, it also g lan ce s tow ards su rrealism ’s estran g in g recon fig­ uration s o f the everyday, to S c h o e n b e rg ’s m usical sy stem and to a w hole new style o f m icro sco p ic sociology in w hich, a s in the work o f A d orn o o r B e n ja m in ’s own study o f P aris, a tran sform ed relation o f part an d w h ole is e stab lish e d .15 In this kind o f m icroan alysis, the individual ph en o m en on is g rasp ed in all o f its overdeterm in ed complexity' a s a kind o f cryptic cod e or riddlin g reb u s to be d ecip h ered , a d rastically abbreviated im age o f social p ro c e sse s which the d isc e rn in g eye will p e rsu a d e it to yield up. It m ight b e argu ed that the cc h o c s o f sym bolic totality thus linger on within th is alternative m ode o f th o u gh t; bu t it is now less a q uestion o f receivin g the object a s som e intuitive given than o f disarticulatin g and recon stru ctin g it through the lab o u r o f the con cept. W hat this m ethod then delivers is a kind o f p o e tic o r novelistic sociology in which the w hole see m s to

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co n sist o f n oth in g but a d e n se tessellation o f g rap h ic im ages; and to this extent it rep resen ts an aesth cticized m odel o f so cial enquiry. It sp rin gs, how ever, from an aesth etic conceived otherw ise - not as so m e sym bolist in h eren ce o f p art in w hole, nor even in L u k äcsian fash ion a s their com plex m ediation, which can be a ccu se d sim ply o f d e ferrin g an d com plicatin g the totality’s firm m astery o f the particular. It is a m atter, rather, o f con stru ctin g a strin gen t econom y o f the o b je ct which n everth eless re fu ses the allure o f identity, allow ing its co n stitu en ts to light each oth er u p in all their co n trad icto rin ess. T h e literary styles o f B en jam in and A dorno th em selves are am o n g the finest exam p les o f this m ode. T h e co n cep t o f constellation, which B en jam in elab o rated in close co llab oration with A d o rn o ,16 is p erh ap s the m ost strikingly original attem pt in the m odern p eriod to break with traditional versions o f totality. It re p re se n ts a determ in ed resistan ce to the m ore paran oid form s o f totalizin g thought on the p a n o f thinkers w ho nevertheless set th eir fa c e s again st any m ere em piricist celebration o f the fragm en t. B y revolutionizing the relations betw een part and whole, the con stellation strikes at the very' heart o f the traditional aesth etic p arad igm , in which the specificity o f the detail is allow ed no genuine resistan ce to the organ izin g pow er o f the totality. T h e aesth etic is thus tu rn ed a g ain st the aesth etic: what su p p osed ly d istin gu ish es art from discu rsiv e th ought - its high d e g re e o f specificity - is pu sh ed to an extrem e, s o that specificity is no lon ger à la L u k a c s both preserved and su sp en d ed . T h e constellation safeguards particularity but fissures identity, e x p lo d in g the ob ject into an array o f conflictive elem en ts and so u n leash in g its m ateriality at the co st o f its se lf-sa m e n e ss. L u k ä c s ’s ‘type’, by c o n tra st, su ffe rs no lo ss o f self-iden tity through its im m ersion in the w hole, but em erg es with that identity d eep en ed and enrich ed. H is Sch illerian aesth etics envisage little conflict betw een the vario u s facets o f the ‘all-ro u n d ’ individual; on the contrary', the ‘typical’ ch a rac te r’s inherence in som e historical e ssen c e ten d s to resolve its v ario u s a sp e cts into harm ony. L u k a c s d o e s in deed think the categ o ry o f con tradiction , but always u n d er the sig n o f unity. T h e cap italist so cial form ation is a totality o f co n tradiction s; what d eterm in es each con tradiction is thus the unity it fo rm s with others; the truth o f contradiction is accordingly unity. It w ou ld b e h ard to think up a m o re blatant contradiction. It is this essen tializin g o f conflict which the co n cep t o f constellation

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is ou t to w orst, and there can be no d ou bt that in develop in g it both B en jam in a n d A dorn o h ad L u k â c s firmly in their sig h ts. It is not, how ever, an id ea without severe difficulties o f its own. F o r on e thing, it circum ven ts the problem o f determinations raised by som e m ore traditional d e b a te s about totality - o f the relative ca u sa l w eight and efficacy o f d iffere n t con stitu en ts within a w hole system . In breakin g with a rigidly rationalistic hierarchy o f values, it te n d s instead to equ alize out all elem en ts o f the object - a m ethod w hich is som etim es p re sse d to an extrem e in the work o f B en jam in , w h ose deliberately casu al ju x tap o sitio n s o f a stray feature o f the su p erstru ctu re with a central co m p o n en t o f the b ase won him a rebuke fro m the m ore soberly m in d ed A d o rn o .17 T h o se radicals who instinctively m istrust the notion o f hierarchy sh ould ask them selves w hether they really believe a esth etics to be as im portant a s apartheid. O n e o f the m ost vital a sp e cts o f the id ea o f totality h as been to provide u s with som e con crete p olitical gu id an ce a s to which institutions a re m ore central than oth ers in the p ro c e ss o f social ch an ge - to e sca p e , in short a purely circu lar notion o f the social form ation in w hich, since every ‘level’ se e m s o f equ al valency with every other, the q u estion o f w here on e politically intervenes m ay b e arbitrarily d ecided. M o st political rad icals, w h eth er they acknow ledge it o r not, are com m itted to som e notion o f h ierarch ical determ ination, believing for exam ple that racist o r sex ist attitu d es are m ore durably tran sform ed by ch an ges o f institution than by efforts to ch an ge co n scio u sn e ss a s such . T h e co n cep t o f totality rem in d s u s forcibly o f the structural lim itations im posed on p articu lar c o u rses o f political action - o f w hat m ust first be d o n e , also d on e, o r rem ain s to be don e in the p u rsu it o f som e political goal. T h e r e is no n eed to su sp ect, in som e convenient straw target o f totalizin g thought, that o u r political action s are therefore sim ply ‘given ’ to u s sp on tan eously by the structure o f th e social whole - a fantasy w hich is m erely the other sid e o f the left reform ist b e lie f (sh ared by a goo d m any right-w ing conservatives) th at there is no ‘ social w hole’ w h atsoever oth er than on e discursively co n stru cted for pragm atic e n d s. T h e d o ctrin e that social life con tain s hierarchical determ ination s d o e s not o f c o u rse autom atically lead to the classical M arx ist view that in h um an h istory to d ate certain m aterial factors have b een o f co n sisten t fu n d am en tal im portan ce. F o r a m ore plu ralist vision, the d om in an ce o f su ch factors is a variable conjunctural m atter: w hat is

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determinant in one context or perspective is not necessarily so in another. Society may thus be conceived along the lines o f som e W ittgensteinian gam e, as a rich array o f strategies, moves and countermoves in which certain priorities are pragmatically appropriate from certain viewpoints. F o r M arxism , society is a duller, drabber, less aesthetically enthralling affair, much m ore prone to compulsive repetition, with a somewhat impoverished range o f moves at its disposal, less like a playground than a prison. In its monotonously determinist manner, M arxism imagines that in order to listen to Bach one m ust first work, or get som eone else to do so, and that moral philosophers could not debate unless child-rearing practices had first put them in place. It argues, moreover, that these material preconditions are not simply the sine qua non o f what flows from them, but continue to exert a decisive force upon it. T h e concept o f constellation carries with it a significant ambiguity about the subjective or objective nature o f such constructive activity. O n the one hand, the model is advanced a s an antidote to all errant subjectivism : concepts m ust cling to the contours o f the thing itself rather than spring from the subject’s arbitrary will, subduing them selves like Schoenberg’s compositional practice to the immanent logic o f their subject-m atter. ‘T here is a delicate em piricism ’, Benjam in quotes Goethe as declaring, ‘which so intimately involves itse lf with the object that it becom es true theory.’ 18 On the other hand, the act o f constellating would seem to entail an idiosyncratic free-wheeling o f the imagination which recalls the devious opportunism o f the allegorist. Indeed at its worst the constellation would appear an unholy mixture o f positivism (what Adorno called the ‘wide-eyed presentation o f m ere facts’ o f Benjam in’s Passagenarbeit)'9 and whimsicality; and it is this combination which Adorno detects in surrealism , whose montages seem to him to involve a fetishism o f im m ediacy yoked to an arbitrary, undialectical subjectivism.20 H e finds som ething o f the sam e blend in Benjam in’s A rcades project, which he chides for a certain occult positivism as well as for a psychologistic fancifulness, finding his friend’s style o f thought at once too exoteric and too esoteric.21 F o r Adorno, both surrealism and Benjam in’s work on Paris threaten to eliminate the active, critical role o f the subject in the interpretative process at the sam e time as they perm it an unbridled subjectivity. And this combination may be endem ic to Benjam in’s notion o f allegory, the death’s head symbol o f

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which d isp lay s a ‘ total e x p re ssio n lcssn ess - the black o f the eyeso ck ets - co u p le d to the m ost un bridled exp ressio n - the grinning row s o f te e th ’.22 F o r all its p rob lem s, the id ea o f constellation su rely rem ain s d u rab le an d su g ge stiv e today. B u t like m uch o f B e n ja m in ’s thought it can n ot b e w holly abstracted from its origin s in h istorical crisis. A s fascism c o m e s to pow er, there is a sen se in which B e n ja m in ’s whole ca re e r b e c o m e s a kind o f urgen t constellating, a co b b lin g together o f w hatever u n p re p o sse ssin g scrap s and fragm en ts com e to hand in the teeth o f a history w hich, like the w ar-w eary regim es o f Trauerspiel\ se e m s to have su b sid e d into ruins. T h e im age o f th e p ast which co u n ts, he a r g u e s in the ‘T h e s e s on the Philosophy o f H isto ry ’ , is that which a p p e a rs unexpectedly to a man sin gled out by history at a m om ent o f d a n g e r; and this is p erh ap s what ‘theory’ m ean s for B en jam in to o , that which u n d er extrem e p ressu re can be hastily throw n to g eth e r an d kept ready to hand. H is project is to blast open the lethal co n tin u u m o f history with the few p o o r w eap on s available to him: shock, allegory, estrangem ent, heterogeneous ‘ch ip s’ o f M essianic tim e, m iniaturization, m echanical reproduction, K a b b alistic inter­ pretative violence, surrealist m ontage, revolutionary nostalgia, reactiv­ ated m em ory traces, re ad in g which bru sh left-h an dedly again st the grain. T h e con dition o f possibility o f m uch o f this aston ish in gly bold en terp rise, a s with the baro qu e allegorists, w as that history w as co llap sin g beh in d on e’s back into fragm en ts - that on e could grub am o n g the ru in s an d scrap e togeth er som e o d d s and e n d s to oppose the in exorable m arch o f ‘p r o g re ss’ only b e cau se the catastroph e had already h ap p e n ed . T h a t catastrop h e gives the lie to the com placen t assu m p tion th at national form ation s arc now definitively ou tm oded by international sp a c e . O n the contrary, what fascism revealed w as that international m onopoly capitalism , far from leaving such national lin eages b eh in d it, w as able to exploit them at a poin t o f extrem e political c r isis for its own e n d s, on ce again draw ing the old an d the new into u n exp ected con stellation . It is precisely su ch c o rre sp o n d ­ en ces betw een the arch aic an d the avant garde w hich characterize N azi ideology, as the se n su o u s specificity o f blood and so il is coupled to tech n ological fetishism and global im perialist expan sion. A t a m om en t o f ultim ate d an ger, B en jam in o v erreacts to the h ub ristic n arratives o f h istoricism ; in deed it is not hard to reject such teleo logies i f on e view s history itself, in M e ssia n ic style, as

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intrinsically negative. T h o se o f Benjam in’s commentators who applaud his anti-teleology may not be quite so eager to endorse the indiscriminate downgrading o f the ‘profane* with which it is bound up. T h e abundant fertility o f Benjam in’s historical imagination is blighted by its catastrophism and apocalypticism; if for the human being in extreme danger history has been reduced to the fortuitous flashing up o f an isolated im age, there are others whose emancipation involves a less aestheticized, more sober and systematic enquiry into the nature o f historical development. Benjam in learned enduringly from what one might read as the implicit slogan o f Bertolt Brecht’s work: U se whatever you can, collect what you can since you never know when it might come in handy. But the corollary o f this valuably idiosyncratic strategy' can be a disabling eclecticism , which in Brecht’s case shades at times into a form o f left-utilitarianism. Benjam in’s fascination with the detritus o f history, with the offbeat, deviant and discarded, offers an essential corrective to a narrowly totalizing ideology at the sam e time as it risks hardening, like certain contemporary theories, into no more than that ideology’s inverted m irror-im age, replacing a theoretical myopia with a corresponding astigmatism. T h e constellation draws together the empirical and the conceptual; and it therefore figures as a strain o f old Eden, a muffled resonance o f that paradisal condition in which, in the discourse o f divinity, sign and object were intimately at one. In Benjam in’s view, humanity has fallen from this felicitous state into a degraded instrumentalism o f language; and language has thus becom e depleted in its expressive, mimetic resources, dwindling to the reified token o f the Saussurean sign. T h e allegorical signifier is dire testimony to our posdapsarian plight, in which we are no longer spontaneously possessed o f the object but forced to blunder our way laboriously from one sign to another, groping for significance am ong the shards o f a now shattered totality. Y et precisely because meaning has leaked from the signifier, its materiality has becom e curiously heightened; the more things and meanings disengage, the more palpable become the material operations o f the allegories which fumble to reunite them. T h e baroque allegorist accordingly takes pleasure in this somatic dimension o f the sign, finding in the creatureliness o f its shape and sound som e purely sensuous residue which escapes the strict regime o f sense to which all

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lan gu age is n ow sh ackled. D isc o u rse h as b een forcibly leash ed to logicality; but the Trauerspiels p reoccu p ation with scrip t a s against voice, its ce rem o n io u s arran gin g o f m atter-lad en h ieroglyph s like so m any e m b alm ed em b lem s, returns to u s an aw aren ess o f the bodily nature o f lan g u a g e. T h e point w here m ean in g and m ateriality are m ost p ain fully divided rem in d s u s by negation o f a p o ssib le unity o f w ord an d w orld , a s well a s o f the som atic foun dation s o f sp ee ch . I f the body is a sig n ifier, then lan gu age is m aterial p ractice. It is part o f the m ission o f ph ilosoph y in B e n jam in ’s view to restore to lan gu age its o cclu d ed sym bolic rich es, rescu e it from its lap se into the im poverish ­ m ent o f co gn itio n so that the word m ay d an ce once ag a in , like those a n ge ls w h ose b o d ie s arc one bu rn in g flam e o f praise b e fo re G o d . T h is re co u p lin g o f co n cep t and body is a traditional p reo ccu p atio n o f the aesth etic. F o r B en jam in , lan guage h as its roots in the actin g out o f m agical co rre sp o n d e n c e s betw een hum anity an d N a tu re ; it is thus originally a m atter o f se n su o u s im ages, and only su b seq u en tly o f id eas. H e fin d s traces o f this expressive m im etic d isc o u rse within our m ore sem io tic, com m unicative sp eech , as in the aesth etics o f M allarm é or the gestu ral lan gu age o f N a p le s.23 F o r the b aro q u e d ram a, the only g oo d body is a d ead one: death is the ultim ate unhin gin g o f m ea n in g an d m ateriality, drain in g life fro m the body to leave it an alleg o rical signifier, i n the Trauerspiel\ B e n jam in w rites, ‘the co rp se b e c o m e s quite sim ply the p re-em in en t em blem atic p rop erty.’24 T h e b aro q u e d ram a revolves on a m an gled bo dy, its p arts d ism em b ere d by a violence in which the plaint for a lost organicism can still be dim ly h eard. S in c e the living body p re se n ts itse lf as an exp ressiv e unity, it is only in its brutal undoing, its d iffu sio n into so m any to m , reified fragm en ts, that the d ram a m ay scavenge for sign ifican ce a m o n g its organ s. M ean in g is ripped from the ruins o f the body, fro m the flayed flesh rather than from the harm onious figu re; an d o n e m ay p erh ap s detect here a faint analog)' with the work o f F r e u d , for w hich it is likew ise in the dividing o f th e body, the d isarticu latin g o f its zon es and organ s, that its ‘ tru th ’ m ay be d isclo sed . It is this kind o f dism em b erm en t, in the m ilder form o f the sh o cks and in vasion s o f urban exp erien ce, which the flâneur o f the A rcad es p roject strives to resist. T h e flâneur o r solitary city stroller, steppin g out with his tu rtle on a lead , m oves m ajestically a g a in st the grain o f the urban m a sse s who w ould d eco m p o se him to som e alien m eaning;

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in this se n se his very style o f w alking is a politics all in itself'. T h is is the aesth eticized body o f the leisured p re-in d u strial w orld, o f the dom estic in terior and n on -com m odified object; w hat m odern society d em an d s is a reconstituted body, on e intim ate with technology and ad ap ted to the su d d en con jun ctures and d isco n n ection s o f urban life. B en jam in ’s p roject, in short, is the construction o f a new kind o f hum an bo d y; and the role o f the cultural critic in this task involves his or h er intervention in what he calls the ‘im age sp h e re ’. In an enigm atic p a ss a g e in his essay on surrealism , he w rites: T h e collective is a body, too. A nd the physis that is being o rg a n ised for it in technology can , through all its political an d factual reality, only be produ ced in that im age sphere to which p rofan e illum ination initiates us. O n ly when in technolog>' body an d im age so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension b e co m e s bodily collective innerva­ tion, a n d all the bodily innervations o f the collective b e co m e revolutionary d isch arge, h as reality tran scen ded itse lf to the extent d em an d ed by the Communist M an ifesto.* A new collective body is bein g organ ized for the individual su b ject by political an d technological ch an ge; and the function o f the critic is to fashion th o se im ages by which hum anity can a ssu m e this unfam iliar flesh. I f the body is con structed out o f im ages, im ages are in their turn form s o f m aterial p ractice. T h e Trauerspiers u n d o in g o f the body is hardly a p le asu rab le affair; bu t this m ay prove yet an oth er instance o f history p ro g re ssin g by its bad sid e, since the d ism an tlin g o f all false organ icist unity is a n ecessary prelud e to the em ergen ce o f the m obile, fu nction al, m ultipurpose body o f technological socialist hum anity. J u s t as the aesth etic for the eighteenth century involved that whole new p rogram m e o f bodily d isciplin es w e call m an n ers, im printing a grace and d e co ro u sn e ss on the flesh, so fo r B en jam in the body m ust be reprogram m ed and rein scribed by the pow er o f the sen su o u s im age. T h e aesth etic, once again, beco m es a politics o f the body, this tim e with a thoroughly m aterialistic inflection. 'ITiis w hole sid e o f B en jam in ’s thought sm a ck s o f an ultram odern ist tech n ologism , o f that anxiety to prove his m aterialist m anh ood in the scep tical eyes o f a B rech t which sits s o uneasily with the tran slato r o f P rou st an d the lover o f Leskov. T h e r e is a strain o f

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left functionalism and triumphalism about this aspect o f Benjam in’s writing, in which the body is conceived as instrument, raw material to be organized, even as machine. N o greater contrast to this could be im agined than the similarly mobile, pluralized, disarticulated body o f Bakhtinian carnival, which disowns all instrumentality in the name o f sen suou s repleteness. I f the project o f aesthetics begins in the Enlightenm ent with a judicious reinsertion o f the body into a dangerously abstract discourse, we arrive with Mikhail Bakhtin at the revolutionary consummation o f that logic, as the body’s libidinal practice explodes the languages o f reason, unity and identity into so m any superfluous bits and pieces. Bakhtin presses the initial modest im pulse o f the aesthetic to a fantastic extrem e: what began with the Earl o f Shaftesbuty and his fellows as the sensual well-being induced by a fine glass o f port has now becom e a cackle o f obscene laughter, as a vulgar, sham eless materialism o f the body - belly, anus, genitals rides roughshod over ruling-class civilities. F o r a brief, politically licensed moment, the flesh makes its insurrection and refuses the inscription o f reason, pitting sensation against concept and libido against law, sum m oning the licentious, sem iotic and dialogical in the face o f that monological authority whose unspoken name is Stalinism. L ik e the constellation, carnival involves both a return to the particular and a constant overriding o f identity, transgressing the body’s frontiers in a play o f crotic solidarity with others. Like the constellation too, it renders things non-identical with themselves in order to adum brate a golden age o f friendship and reconciliation, but refuses all graven im ages o f such a goal. T h e dialectical image sphere o f carnival (birth/death, high/low, destruction/renewal) reconstitutes the body as collectivity, organizes a physis for it, in just the way Benjam in proposes. F o r all his austerity and melancholia, this Bakhtinian vision is not entirely foreign to Benjamin, who writes o f the alienation effects o f epic theatre that ‘there is no better starting point for thought than laughter; speaking more generally, spasm s of the diaphragm generally offer better chances for thought than spasm s o f the soul. Epic theatre is lavish only in the occasions it offers for laughter.’26 T h e alienation effect distantiates the dramatic action, thwarts any intense psychical investment in it on the part o f an audience, and so perm its a

pleasurable economizing of affect expended in laughter. For both Bakhtin and Benjam in, laughter is the very type o f expressive somatic

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utterance, an enun ciation which sp rin gs straight from the body’s libidinal d e p th s an d s o for B en jam in carrie s a reso n an ce o f the en d an g ere d sym bolic o r m im etic d im en sion o f lan gu age. Indeed it is sign ifican t th at when he w rites in his essay on su rrealism o f the recon stru ctio n o f the body, he rem arks o f the critic w ho fo rsak es a literary c a r e e r for the bu ild in g o f the im age sp h ere that ‘the jo k e s he tells are the b etter for it’ .27 T h e joke is a graph ic, co n d en sed p iece o f utterance tied closely to the body, an d so typical o f what B en jam in m ean s by an effective im age. H u m an ity, B en jam in w rites in his essay on m ech an ical re p ro d u c­ tion, h as re ach e d su ch a d egre e o f self-alien ation ‘ that it can now exp erien ce its own d estruction as an aesth etic p le a su re o f the first order. T h i s is the situation o f politics which fa scism is ren derin g aesth etic. C o m m u n ism resp o n d s by p oliticisin g art.’ 28 T h is fam ou s final p h ra se is su rely not recom m en d in g the displacement o f art by politics, a s a certain ultra-leftist curren t o f theory h a s occasionally in terpreted it. O n the contrary', B en jam in ’s own revolutionary politics are in all k in d s o f w ays aesth etic - in the con crete particularity o f the con stellation , the ‘au ratic’ mémoire involontaire w hich o ffers a m odel for revolutionary tradition, the shift from d isco u rse to sen su o u s im age, the restoratio n o f the lan guage o f the body, th e celebration o f m im esis as a non -dom in ative relation betw een hum anity an d its w orld. B en jam in is in search o f a surrealist history’ a n d politics, one which clin g s ten aciously to the fragm ent, the m in iatu re, the stray citation, but w hich im p acts th ese fragm en ts one up on the oth er to politically exp losiv e e ffect, like the M essiah who will tran sfigure the w orld com p letely by m ak in g m inor adju stm en ts to it. T h e B en jam in who on ce d re am e d o f w riting an entire work co n sistin g o f nothing but qu o tatio n s is out to rew rite the w hole o f M arx a s a m on tage o f arrestin g im agery, in w hich every' proposition will be p rese rv e d exactly as it is yet tran sfo rm ed out o f recognition. B ut i f his p olitics arc in this sen se aesth etic, it is only b e ca u se he h as su bv erted alm ost all o f traditional a e sth e tic s’ cen tral categ o ries (beauty, harm ony, totality, ap p ea ra n c e), startin g in stead from what B rech t called the ‘bad new th in g s’ an d d isco v erin g in the structure o f the com m odity, the death o f storytelling, the vacancy o f historical tim e and the technology o f capitalism it s e lf th ose M e ssian ic im p u lses which arc still feebly astir there. L ik e B a u d e laire , B en jam in b rin gs the very new into sh ockin g con jun ction w ith the very old, with atavistic m em o ries o f a society as

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yet unmarked by class-division, so that with Paul K lee ’s angelus novus he can be blown backwards into the future with his eyes fixed mournfully upon the past.

Notes 1 See Richard Wolin, Waller Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York, 1982), p. 130. 2 See Raymond Williams, ‘Beyond Cambridge English*, in Writing in Society (London, 1983). 3 Sean Golden, ‘Post-traditional English literature: a polemic*, in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin, 1982). 4 Georg Lukics, History and Class Consciousness (London, 1968), p. 155. 5 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), p. 45. 6 Lukics, History and Class Consciousness, p. 163. 7 Ibid., p. 137. 8 Ibid. 9 See Georg Lukics, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (Neuwied, 1963). 10 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik - die Aktualität Walter Benjamins*, in Siegfried Unseld (ed.), Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1972), p. 205. 11 Walter Benjamin, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama (London, 1977), p. 34. 12 Ibid., p. 33. 13 For excellent accounts of this process, see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin, chapter 3, and Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialedia (Hassocks, 1977), chapter 6. 14 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London, 1974), pp. 151-2. 15 See David Frisby, Fragments ofModernity (Cambridge, 1985). 16 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, chapter 1. 17 See Theodor Adorno, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin*, in Ernst Bloch et a l , Aesthetic and Politics (London, 1977), pp. 128-30. 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History o f Photography*, in One-Way Street (London, 1979), p. 252. 19 Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics, p. 129. 20 See Theodor Adorno, ‘Der Surrealismus*, in Noten zur Literatur, vol. 1 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1958). 21 Sec Bloch ct al., Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation 111. 22 Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 70. 23 Sec ‘Naples’, in Benjamin, One-Way Street. 339

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24 25 26 27 28

Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 218. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 239. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London, 1973), p. 101. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 238. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work o f Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction*, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London, 1973), p. 244.

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13 A r t after Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno An ‘aesthetic’ thought is one true to the opacity o f its object. But if thought is conceptual, and so general, how can ‘aesthetic thought’ be other than an oxymoron? How can the mind not betray the object in the very act o f possessing it, struggling to register its density and recalcitrance at just the point it impoverishes it to som e pallid universal? It would seem that the crude linguistic instruments with which we lift a thing towards us, preserving as much as possible o f its unique quality, simply succeed in pushing it further away. In order to do justice to the qualitative moments o f the thing, thought must thicken its own texture, grow gnarled and close-grained; but in doing so it becom es a kind o f object in its own right, sheering o ff from the phenom enon it hoped to encircle. As T h eod o r Adorno remarks: ‘the consistency o f its perform ance, the density o f its texture, helps the thought to m iss the mark*.1 D ialectical thinking seeks to grasp whatever is heterogeneous to thought as a m om ent o f thought itself, ‘reproduced in thought itself as its immanent contradiction*.2 But since one risks eradicating that heterogeneity in the very act o f reflecting upon it, this enterprise is always teetering on the brink o f blowing itse lf up. Adorno has a kind o f running solution to this dilemma, and that is style. What negotiates this contradiction is the crabbed, rébarbative practice o f writing itself, a discourse pitched into a constant state o f crisis, twisting and looping back on itself, struggling in the structure o f every sentence to avoid at once a ‘bad’ immediacy o f the object and the false self-identity o f the concept. Dialectical thought digs the object loose from its illusory self-identity, but thereby risks liquidating it within some ghastly concentration camp o f the Absolute Idea; and Adorno’s provisional

ART AFTER AUSCHWITZ

response to this problem is a set o f guerilla raids on the inarticulable, a style o f philosophizing which fram es the object conceptually but m anages by som e cerebral acrobatics to glance sideways at what gives such generalized identity the slip. Every sentence o f his texts is thus forced to work overtime; each phrase must become a little masterpiece or m iracle o f dialectics, fixing a thought in the second before it disappears into its own contradictions. Like Benjam in’s, this style is a constellatory one, each sentence a kind o f crystallized conundrum from which the next is strictly non-deducible, a tight-m eshed economy o f epigram m atic aperçus in which every part is somehow autonom ous yet intricately related to its fellows. All M arxist philosophers are supposed to be dialectical thinkers; but with Adorno one can feel the sweat and strain o f this m ode alive in every phrase, in a language rammed up against silence where the reader has no sooner registered the one-sidedness o f som e proposition than the opposite is im m ediately proposed. T h e complaint that we live in som e disabling gap between concept and thing becom es in the hands o f thinkers less subtle than Adorno a kind o f category error. Why should thoughts be like things, any more than the notion o f freedom should resem ble a ferret? Behind this nom inalist plaint that words violate the quiddity o f things, which is far from Adorno’s own reflections, lies a nostalgia for the happy garden in which every object wore its own word in much the way that ever)' flower flaunts its peculiar scent. But the fact that language universalizes is part o f what it is, not som e lapse or limit from which we might hope to be cured. It is not a defect o f the word ‘ foot’ that it refers to more feet than my own two, careless o f the peculiarity o f my own personal pair. T o mourn the non-particularism o f language is as m isplaced as regretting that one cannot tune into the W orld C u p on a w ashing machine. T h e concept o f a thing is not som e pale mental replica o f it, damagingly bereft o f the thing’s sensuous life, but a set o f social practices - a way o f doing som ething with the word which denotes the thing. A concept is no more like an object than the use o f a span n er is like a spanner. Poetry strives to phenomenalize language, bu t this, as Adorno sees, is entirely self-defeating, since the m ore it labours to be like the thing the more it becom es a thing in its own right, w'hich resem bles the object no more than a squirrel resem bles the slave trade. Perhaps it is a pity that we lack a word to capture the unique arom a o f coffee - that our speech is wizened and anaemic,

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rem ote from th e taste and feel o f reality. B u t how c o u ld a w ord, as o p p o se d to a p a ir o f n ostrils, captu re the arom a o f anything, and is it a m atter o f failu re that it d o e s not? T h is is not to su g g e st, on the oth er h an d, that A d orn o is m istaken in believin g o u r co n cep ts to b e reified an d in ad equ ate, adrift from ou r se n su o u s p ra ctice ; in d eed it is precisely in h is co n cern to return thought to the body, lend it som eth in g o f the body’s feel and fullness, that he is in th e m ost traditional sen se o f the w ord an aesthetician. H is work, how ever, h erald s on e m om entou s shift o f e m p h asis in that tradition. F o r w hat the body sig n als to A dorno is not first o f all p leasu re bu t su ffe rin g . In the shadow o f A uschw itz it is in sh eer physical w retch ed n ess, in hum an sh ap e s at the end o f their tether, that the body on ce m ore ob tru d es itse lf into the rarefied w orld o f the p h ilosop h ers. ‘ I f thought is not m easu red by the extrem ity that elu d es the c o n c e p t/ h e rem arks in Negative Dialectics, ‘it is from the ou tset in the n ature o f th e m u sical accom pan im en t with which the S S liked to drow n out the screa m s o f its victim s.’ 1 Even this in tolerable agony, o f co u rse , m u st som eh o w en gage the id ea o f p leasu rab le w ell-bein g, for how co u ld we m easu re su ffe rin g without such an im plicit norm ? B ut if there is an y b a sis at all for a universal history, it is not a talc o f cum ulative h ap p in ess but, as A dorno com m en ts, the narrative that lea d s from the slin gsh ot to the m egaton bom b. ‘T h e O n e an d All that k eeps rolling o n to this day - with occasion al breath ing sp e lls - w ould id e o lo g ic ally b e the absolute o f su fferin g .’4 T h e re is in d eed , a s M arx recogn ized , a sin g u la r global story which w eaves all m en and w om en into its fabric* from the S to n e A ge to S ta r W ars; but it is a tale o f scarcity an d o p p re ssio n , not o f su c c e ss - a fable, a s A d orn o p u ts it, o f perm anent catastrophe. T h e body h as lived on, despite the depredations o f in stru m en tal reaso n ; bu t in the N azi death cam p s th o se d e p re d a ­ tions have n ow acco m p lish ed their d ead liest w ork. F o r A d orn o, there can be no re al history after such an event, ju st the twilight or afterm ath in w hich tim e still m oves listlessly, vacuously on, even though hum anity itse lf h as com e to a full stop. F o r a Je w like A dorno, there can only be the guilty m ystery that one is still, by som e oversigh t, alive. A d orn o’s politics o f the body is thus the very reverse o f B akh tin ian : the only im age o f the body which is m ore than a blasp h e m o u s lie is stark an d skeletal, the p oo r forked creatu re o f B cckettian hum anity. In the w ake o f the N az is, the w hole aesth etic co n cern with se n satio n , with the innocent creaturely life, h as b eco m e

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irreversibly d isfigu red - for fascism , a s A dorno a rg u e s in M inim a in the T h ir d R eich the a b stract h o rro r o f new s an d ru m ou r w as enjoyed a s the only stim ulus su fficien t to incite a m om entary glow in the w eakened sen soriu m o f the m a sse s’ .5 S e n satio n in such con dition s b e co m e s a m atter o f co m m o d ified sh o ck-valu e regard less o f content: everything can now b eco m e p le a su re , ju st as the desen sitized m orphine addict will grab in discrim in ately at any d ru g. T o p osit the body an d its p le asu res a s an u n q uestion ab ly affirm ative category is a d an gero u s illusion , in a social o rd e r w hich reifies an d regu lates corporeal p leasu re fo r its own en d s ju st as relen tlessly a s it colon izes the m ind. Any return to the body w hich fails to reckon this truth into its calculation s will be m erely

M oralia, ‘w as the absolu te sen satio n . . .

naive; an d it is to A d orn o’s cred it that, co n scio u s o f th is a s he is, he d o e s not flinch from trying to red eem w hat he ca lls the 'som atic m om en t’ o f cogn ition , that irreducible d im en sion w hich acco m p an ies all o u r acts o f co n scio u sn e ss but can never be e xh au sted by them . T h e aesth e tic p ro ject m ust not be ab an d on ed , even if its term s o f referen ce have been perm anently tainted by fascism an d ‘ m a ss’ society. T h e in ad équ atio n betw een thing and con cept is im portantly twoway. I f the co n c e p t can never app rop riate the ob ject w ithout leaving a rem ain d er, then it is also true that the o b ject - ‘ fre e d o m ’, for exam ple - fails to ach ieve the fu lln ess p ro m ised by its con cept. W hat prevents us from fully p o sse ssin g the w orld is also w hat invests that w orld with som e wan h op e, the lack which sp u rs the thing out o f its self-identity so a s to rise to w hat it m ight in principle becom e. An identity o f con cep t a n d p h en om en on is for A dorno ‘the prim al form o f ideology*,6 a n d A uschw itz confirm ed the p h ilosop h em e o f pure identity a s d eath ; bu t for him there is alw ays an oth er sid e to the story, unlike th o se p resen t-d ay th eorists w hose pluralism w ou ld seem to w ear a little thin when it co m e s to recogn izin g that identity, too, can have its value. ‘ L iv in g in the rebuke that the thing is n ot identical with the co n cep t’ , A dorn o w rites, ‘is the co n cep t’s lo n gin g to beco m e identical wirh the thing. T h is is how the sen se o f non-identity con tain s identity. T h e sup p osition o f identity is in deed the ideological clem en t o f p u re th ought all the way through to form al logic; but hidden in it is also the truth m om ent o f ideology, the p le d g e that there sh ould be n o con tradiction , no an tago n ism .’7 It w ould be a grim p ro sp ect if th e co n cep t o f liberty o r equality really w as identical with

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the p o o r travesty o f it we observe aroun d u s. O u r cu rren t con ception s o f identity can be sh aken not only by d ifferen ce, but by an identity which w ould b e otherw ise - which b elo n g s to the political fu ture, bu t w hich reverb erates as a faint ech o o r p led g e o f recon ciliation even in o u r m ost p aran o id p resen t-d ay identifications. T h a t su ch a thought is sca n d a lo u s to the m ere celebration o f d ifferen ce is a m ea su re o f its subversive fo rce. C la ssic a l d ialectical th ought, for which ‘con tradiction is n on ­ identity u n d er th e sign o f identity’,8 is p erfecd y capable o f registering the h e tero g e n eo u s: it sim ply m easu re s it by its own p rin cip les o f unity, th ereby coolly reckonin g in to itse lf what it h as ju st ackn ow led ged to be irreducibly exterior. W hat it extracts from the o b je ct is only w h at w as already, in any ca se , a thought. A d o rn o , on the oth er h an d , b eliev es with the decon structive theory h e prefigu res alm ost in its entirety in ‘ identity’s dep en d en ce on the n on -id en tical’ .9 T h e in d isso lu b le m ust be brough t into its own in co n cep ts, not su b su m e d u n d e r an ab stract id ea in that gen eralized b arter o f the m ind which m irrors the equalizing exchanges o f the m arket place. F o r A dorn o a s for N ie tz sc h e , idendficatory thought h as its so u rc e in the eyes an d sto m ach , the lim bs and m outh. T h e pre-h istory o f su ch violent ap p rop riation o f o th ern ess is that o f the early h um an predator out to d evou r the n ot-I. D om in ative reason is ‘ the belly turned m in d’,10 an d su c h atavistic rage again st oth ern ess is th e hallm ark o f every h ig h -m in d ed id ealism . All philosophy, even that w hich intends freedom , b e a r s within itse lf like a p rim ordial urge the coercion by which society p ro lo n g s its op p ressive existen ce. B u t for A d orn o there is alw ays an o th e r story, an d this particular argu m en t is n o exception. T h e co erciv e n e ss o f the identity prin ciple, installed at the heart o f E n ligh ten m en t reason , is also w hat prevents thought fro m lap sin g into m ere lice n ce; an d in its own path ological way it p a ro d ie s, as well a s fo restalls, so m e authen tic reconciliation o f su b jec t and object. W hat is re q u ire d , then, is ‘ a rational critique o f re aso n , not its ban ish m en t o r abolition ’ 11 - hardly a su rp risin g p osition for one w hom the abolition o f reaso n drove into exile. T h e p ro b lem is how to p rise loose th e grip o f an in san e rationality w ithout allow ing the sligh test o p e n in g to som e b arb aro u s irrationalism . T h is p ro je c t involves thinking through the relatio n s betw een universal an d p a rtic u la r once again , this tim e on som e m odel other than that o f th e sin gu lar law which flattens all specificity to its own

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im age and liken ess. I f A d orn o’s style is tortuous a n d unsettling, it is partly b e c a u se th ese relations are th em selves fraugh t and unquiet, forever likely to slip out o f focus a s he steers a p rec ario u s course betw een the S cy lla o f blind p articularism and the C h ary b d is o f the tyrannical co n cep t. ‘U n reflective nom inalism ’, he w rites, ‘ is a s w rong as the realism that e q u ip s a fallible lan guage with th e attributes o f a revealed o n e .’ 12 T h e way to avoid an oppressive totality is through the con stellation : we a rc not to ph ilosoph ise about con crete th in gs; we are to p h ilosop h ise, rather, out o f th ose things . . . there is no ste p -b y -step p ro g ressio n from the con cepts to a m ore gen eral cover con cept. In stead , the co n cepts en ter into a con stellation . . . B y gath erin g aroun d the ob ject o f cogn ition , the con cep ts potentially determ ine th e o b ject’s interior. T h e y attain, in thinking, what w as necessarily e x c ised from thinking.13 Paradoxically, how ever, this circum vention o f totality is only possible be cau se o f it. I f it is true that ‘objectively - not ju st through the knowing su b je c t - the whole which theory e x p re sse s is con tained in the individual o b ject to be an alysed ’, M this is becau se in an in creasingly ad m in istered , m anipulated w orld ‘the m ore tightly the netw ork o f gen eral definitions covers its o b jects, the greater will be the ten dency o f individual facts to be direct tran sparen cies o f their un iversals, and the g reater the yield a view er ob tain s precisely by m icrological im m ersio n ’. 15 W e m ay forget about totality, but totality, for good o r ill, will not forget abo u t us, even in ou r m o st m icroscopic m ed itation s. I f we can un pack the whole from the m ost hum ble p articular, glim pse eternity in a grain o f san d , th is is b e cau se we inhabit a so cial o rd er which tolerates particularity only as an obedient in stan tiation o f the universal. W e m ust no longer aim thought directly at this totality, but neither should we su rren d er o u rselv es to som e p ure play o f d ifferen ce, which w ould be quite a s m on oton ous as the d reariest self-iden tity and indeed finally in distinguishable from it.16 W e m ust rath er grasp the truth that the individual is both m ore and le ss than its gen eral definition, and that the prin ciple o f identity' is always self-co n trad ictory, p erpetu atin g non-identity in dam aged , su p p re sse d form a s a condition o f its being.

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T h e place where particular and universal consort most harmoniously is traditionally supposed to be art. T h e aesthetic, as we have seen, is that privileged condition in which the law o f the whole is nothing but the interrelations o f the parts. But if this is true, then each part is still governed by what is in effect a total system ; and it is this chiasmus o f the aesthetic which Adorno will try to outflank. In art, the emancipation o f the particular would seem merely to lead to a new form o f global subordination; and it is surely not difficult to see how this contradiction corresponds to the amphibious nature o f bourgeois society, in which the ideal o f an interchange o f autonomous individuals is constantly thwarted by the persistence o f exploitation. T h e work o f art appears free from the viewpoint o f its particular elem ents, but these elements appear unfree from the standpoint o f the law which surreptitiously m arshals them into unity. In a similar way, the individual subject is free from the viewpoint o f the market place, but not from the perspective o f the state which violently or manipulatively preserves that market place in being. Adorno seeks to recast the relations between global and specific by finding in the aesthetic an impulse to reconciliation between them which must never quite come off, a utopian yearning for identity which m ust deny itse lf under pain o f fetishism and idolatry. T h e work o f art suspends identity without cancelling it, broaches and breaches it simultaneously, refusing at once to underwrite antagonism o r supply false consolation. I f its movement is thus one o f perpetual deferral, this is less because o f som e ontological condition o f language than because o f the Ju d aeo -M an d st prohibition on the fashioning o f graven im ages o f a political future which must nonetheless be remembered. A rt may thus offer an alternative to thought, which for the Adorno o f Dialectic o f Enlightenment has becom e inherently pathological. All rationality is now instrumental, and simply to think is therefore to violate and victimize. A valid theory could only be one which thinks against itself, undoes its every act, achieves a frail evocation o f that which its own discursivity denies. Emancipatory thought is an enorm ous irony, an indispensable absurdity in which the concept is at once deployed and disowned, no sooner posited than surmounted, illuminating truth only in the dim glare o f light by which it selfdestructs. T h e utopia o f knowledge would be to open up the nonconceptual to concepts without rendering it equivalent to them; and this involves reason somehow hauling itself up by its own bootstraps,

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for i f th o u gh t is intrinsically violatory how h as th e thought which thinks th is truth not already fallen victim to the very crim e it d en o u n ce s? I f em an cipatory thought is a scan d alo u s con tradiction , so in a differen t se n s e is the dom inative reason it se e k s to unlock. H istorically speaking, su ch reason h elp s to release th e s e lf from its en slav em en t to myth an d N atu re ; bu t in a devastatin g irony the drive to this en ab lin g autonom y itse lf h ard en s into a kind o f ferociou s anim al co m p u lsio n , subvertin g the very freedom it s e ts in p lace. In re p re ssin g its ow n in n er nature in the nam e o f in d ep en d en ce, the su b ject fin d s itse lf throttling the very spontaneity w hich its break with N atu re su p p o se d ly set free - so that the upsh ot o f ail this stren u ou s lab our o f individuation is an underm in in g o f the e g o from within, as the s e l f g rad u ally im p lod es into som e em pty, m echan ical conform ity. T h e fo rgin g o f the ego is thus an am bivalently em an cipatory and repressive even t; an d the un co n sciou s is m arked by a sim ilar duality, p ro m isin g u s som e b lissfu l se n su o u s fulfilm ent b u t th reatening at every m om en t to thrust u s back to that arch aic, un differen tiated state in which w e arc no lo n ger su b jec ts at all, let alone liberated ones. F a scism th en gives u s the w orst o f all p o ssib le w orlds: the to m , w ou nded N a tu re over which an im periou s reason h as tram pled return s with a ven gean ce as blood, gu ts an d soil, bu t in the cru ellest o f iron ies is now h arn e sse d to that brutally instrum ental reason itself, in an unholy co u p lin g o f the atavistic an d futuristic, sav ag e irrationalism an d tech n ological dom inion. F o r A dorno, the s e l f is rent by an internal fissu re , an d the n am e for the experien ce o f it is suffering. H ow , then, is the identity o f the su b ject, which is a constitutive m om ent o f its freed o m an d autonom y, to be co m b in ed with the se n su o u sn e ss an d spontaneity on which the drive to autonom y has inflicted su c h grievou s d am age? A d orn o’s solu tion to this riddle is the aesth etic - in s o far, that is, as art is now p o ssib le at all. M o d ern ism is art forced in to m ute selfco n trad iction ; an d the so u rce o f this internal im p a sse lies in art’s co n tradictory m aterial statu s within b o u rg eo is society. C u ltu re is deeply lock ed into the structure o f com m odity p rodu ction ; but one e ffect o f this is to release it into a certain ideological autonom y, hence allow ing it to sp eak again st the very social o rd e r with which it is guiltily com plicit. It is this com plicity which sp u rs art into p rotest, but which also strik es that protest agonized and in effectual, form al

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gesture rather than irate polemic. Art can only hope to be valid if it provides an implicit critique o f the conditions which produce it - a validation which, in evoking art’s privileged remoteness from such conditions, instantly invalidates itself. Conversely, art can only be authentic if it silently acknowledges how deeply it is compromised by what it opposes; but to press this logic too far is precisely to underm ine its authenticity. T h e aporia o f modernist culture lies in its plaintive, stricken attempt to turn autonomy (the free-standing nature o f the aesthetic work) against autonomy (its functionless status as comm odity on the market); what warps it into non-self-identity is the inscription o f its own material conditions on its interior. It would seem that art must now either abolish itself entirely - the audacious strategy o f the avant garde - or hover indecisively between life and death, subsum ing its own impossibility into itself. At the sam e time, it is this internal slippage or hiatus within the art work, this impossibility o f ever coinciding exactly with itself, which provides the very source o f its critical power, in a world where objects lie petrified in their monotonously self-sam e being, doom ed to the hell o f being no more than themselves. It is as though Adorno, who w as never much entranced by the avant garde and can hardly bring h im self to say a polite word about Bertolt Brecht, seizes upon the dilem m a o f culture in late capitalism and p resses it to a calculated extrem e, so that in a defiant reversal it is the very impotence o f an autonom ous art which will be wrenched into its finest aspect, victory snatched from the jaws o f defeat as art’s shaming privilege and futility is carried to a Beckettian limit and at that point begins to veer on its axis to becom e (negative) critique. Like Beckett, Adorno maintains a compact with failure, which is where for both Jew and Irishm an all authenticity must start. An artistic vacuity which is the product o f social conditions, and so part o f the problem, can come by som e strange logic to figure as a creative solution. T h e more art suffers this relentless kenosis, the more powerfully it speaks to its historical epoch; the more it turns its back on social issues, the more politically eloquent it grows. T here is som ething perversely selfdefeating about this aesthetic, which takes it cue from a notable contradiction o f ‘autonomous’ culture - the fact that art’s independence o f social life permits it a critical force which that sam e autonomy tends to cancel out. ‘Neutralisation’, as Adorno comments, ‘is the social price art pays for its autonomy.’ 17 T h e more socially dissociated

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art b e c o m e s, the m ore scan d alously subversive and utterly p oin tless it is. F o r art to refer; even protestingly, is for it to b e co m e instantly collusive with what it o p p o se s; negation n egates it s e lf b e cau se it cannot h elp p ositin g the very ob ject it d e sire s to destroy. Any positive en u n ciation is co m p ro m ised by the very fact o f b e in g su ch ; and it follow s th at w hat on e is left with is the p u rest im print o f the gestu re o f negation itself, which m ust never stray from the elevated level o f form to anything a s lowly as content. S o it is that A dorn o co m e s to reh earse with a new inflection all the reactionary clich es w hich a com m itted art custom arily attracts, railing at its supposed schem atism and reductivism. T h e m ost profoun dly political work is one that is entirely silent about politics, a s fo r som e the greatest p oet is on e who h as never sullied his gen iu s with anything as sordidly determ in ate a s a poem . F o r A d o rn o , all art con tain s a utopian m om ent: ‘even in the m ost su blim ated work o f art there is a hidden “ it should b e oth erw ise” . . . as em in en tly con structed and p ro d u ced ob jects, w orks o f art, in cludin g literaiy o n es, point to a practice from w hich they abstain: the creatio n o f a ju st life’.'" By their sh eer p resen ce, a rte facts testify to the p ossibility o f the non -existen t, su sp en d in g a d e b a se d em pirical existen ce an d th us e xp ressin g an un co n sciou s d e sire to change the w orld. All a rt is con sequ en tly radical - an optim ism which is m erely the oth er fa c e o f A d orn o’s political p essim ism , an d every bit as in d iscrim in ate. P o p e’s Essay on Alan m ust for A d orn o be politically p ro g ressiv e , and p erh ap s m ore so than Mother Courage, sin ce he generally fails to extend to the revolutionary avant g arde the absolution fro m its sin s o f content he grants to art in gen eral. Sim ply by virtue o f its fo rm s, art sp eak s up for the con tin gen t, sen su o u s and n on -id en tical, b e a rs w itness to the rights o f the re p re sse d against the com pulsive pathology o f the identity principle. It redraw s the relations betw een th e intellective an d the p erceptual, an d in K antian vein is sim ilar to th e co n cep t without actually beco m in g o n e , releasin g a m inetic, n on -con ccp tu al potential. T h e artefact tip s the balance betw een su b jec t and ob ject firmly on the sid e o f the latter, o u stin g the im perialism o f reason with a se n su o u s receptivity to the thing; it thus con tain s a m em ory trace o f m im esis, o f an equ able affinity betw een hum anity a n d n ature, which anticipates som e fu tu re reconciliation betw een the individual an d the collective. A s a ‘n on -regressive integration o f d iv ergen ces’, the art work tran scen d s th e an tagon ism s o f everyday life without p rom isin g to abolish them ; it is therefore,

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perhaps, ‘the only remaining medium o f truth in an age o f incomprehensible terror and suffering1.19 In it, the hidden irrationality o f a rationalized society is brought to light; for art is a ‘rational’ end in itself, whereas capitalism is irrationally so. Art has a kind o f paratactic logicality' about it, akin to those dream im ages which blend cogency and contingency; and it might thus be said to represent an arational reason confronting an irrational rationality. I f it acts as an implicit refutation o f instrumentalized reason, it is no mere abstract negation o f it; rather, it revokes the violence inflicted by such reason by em ancipating rationality from its present empirical confinement, and so appears as the process by which rationality’ criticizes itself without bein g able to overcome itself. It would be quite mistaken, however, to imagine that Adorno uncritically affirm s modernist culture, setting it over against a dominative society. On the contrary, art is by no m eans free o f the principle o f domination, which takes the shape within it o f its regulative or constructive drive, that im pulse which invests it with a provisional unity and identity. T h e more the work o f art seeks to liberate itself from external determinations, the more it becom es subject to self-positing principles o f organization, which mime and internalize the law o f an adm inistered society'. Ironically, the ‘purity’ o f the m odernist work’s form is borrowed from the technical, functional form s o f a rationalized social order: art holds out against dom ination in its respect for the sensuous particular, but reveals itself again and again as an ideological ally o f such oppression. T h e ‘ spiritualization* o f the artefact corrects this actual oppressiveness, b u t is itself secretly modelled on that very' structure, assimilating itself to N ature by exerting an unlimited sway over its materials. Art thus releases the specific, but represses it too: ‘ T h e ritual o f dominating nature lives on in play.*20 It is not a resolved totality; but it carries within it an im pulse to smooth over discontinuities, and all artistic construction thus strains ineluctably towards ideology'. M oreover, if art is subject like everything else to the law o f objectification, it cannot avoid a kind o f fetishism. T h e transcendence o f the artefact lies in its power to dislocate things from their empirical contexts and reconfigurate them in the im age o f freedom ; but this a lso m eans that art works ‘kill what they objectify, tearing it away from its context o f immediacy’ and real life’.21 Art’s autonomy is a form o f reification, reproducing what it resists; there can be no critique

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without the objectification o f spirit, but critique thus lapses to the status o f thinghood and so threatens to undo itself. T h e modernist culture Adorno espouses cannot help positing itself as independent o f any conditions o f material production, and so insidiously perpetuates false consciousness; but the fetishistic character o f the work is also a condition o f its truth, since it is its blindness to the material world o f which it is a part which enables it to break the spell o f the reality principle. I f art is always radical, it is also always conservative, reinforcing the illusion o f a separate domain o f spirit ‘whose practical impotence and complicity with the principle o f unmitigated disaster are painfully evident’.22 What it gains in one direction, it loses in another; if it eludes the logic o f a degraded history, then it must pay a heavy price for this freedom, part o f which is a reluctant reproduction o f that very logic. Art for Adorno is thus less some idealized realm o f being than contradiction incarnate. Every artefact works resolutely against itself, and this in a whole variety o f ways. It strives for some pure autonomy, but knows that without a heterogeneous m om ent it would be nothing, vanishing into thin air. It is at once being-for-itself and being-forsociety, always simultaneously itself and som ething else, critically estranged from its history yet incapable o f taking up a vantage-point beyond it. By forswearing intervention in the real, artistic reason accrues to itself a certain precious innocence; but at the sam e time all art resonates with social repression, and becom es culpable precisely because it refuses to intervene. Culture is truth and illusion, cognition and false consciousness, at a stroke: like all spirit, it suffers from the narcissistic delusion o f existing for itself, but does so in a way which offers to negate all false claims to such self-identity in the comm odified world around it. Delusion is art’s very mode o f existence, which is not to grant it a license to advocate delusion. I f the content o f the art work is an illusion, it is in som e sense a necessary one, and so does not lie; art is true to the degree that it is an illusion o f the non-illusory. In positing itself as illusion, it exposes the realm o f com m odities (o f which it is one) as unreal, thus forcing illusion into the service o f truth. Art is an allegory o f undeluded happiness - to which it adds the fatal rider that this cannot be had, continually breaking the prom ise o f the well-being it adum brates. In all o f these ways, art contains truth and ideology' at once. In liberating particulars from the logic o f identification, it presents us

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with an alternative to exchange-value, but thus cons us into the gullible faith that there are things in the world which are not for exchange. As a form o f play, it is progressive and regressive at the sam e time, raising us for a blessed moment above the constraints o f practice but only to draw us back into an infantile ignorance o f the instrumental. Artefacts are divided against themselves, at once determinate and indeterminate; and nowhere is this more obvious than in the discrepancy between their mimetic (sensuous-expressive) and rational (constructive-organisational) moments. One o f the many paradoxes o f art is how the act o f making can cause the appearance o f a thing unmade; the ‘natural* materials which the art work mimes, and the ‘rational* forms which regulate them, will always be divergent, constituting a slippage or dissonance at the very heart o f the work. M ediated through one another, these two dim ensions o f the artefact arc nevertheless non-identical, which allows art’s mimetic aspect to provide an implicit criticism o f the structuring forms with which it interpenetrates.23 But this subtle mismatching, which is a question o f the work’s objective logic, detaches it from the mastery o f a singular authorial intention, releases it into autonomy and so permits it to becom e an im age o f possible future reconciliation. In a striking irony, it is the art work’s inner irreconcilability which puts it at odds with a reified empirical world and thus holds out the promise o f a future social harmony. Every work o f art pretends to be the totality it can never becom e; there is never, pace Lukâcs, any achieved mediation o f particular and universal, mimetic and rational, but always a diremption between them which the work will cover up as best it can. Artefacts for Adorno are ridden with inconsistencies, pitched battles between sen se and spirit, astir with fragments which stubbornly resist incorporation. T h eir materials will always put up a fight against the dominatwe rationality which rips them from their original contexts and seeks to synthesize them at the expense o f their qualitatively different moments. Com plete artistic determination, in which every elem ent o f the work would become o f equal value, collapses into absolute contingency. T h e artwork is thus centripetal and centrifugal together, a portrait o f its own impossibility, living testimony to the fact that dissonance is the truth o f harmony. S u c h a case, however, is not to be m istaken for that simple-minded hymning o f the ineffable particular into which a later, less politically engaged deconstruction has som etim es degenerated. I f Adorno is the

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ap ologist fo r d ifferen ce, heterogeneity an d the ap oretic, he is also im plicated en ough in the political stru g g les o f his tim e to b e able to se e m ore than m etaphysical delu sion in such fu ndam ental hum an values a s solidarity', m utual affinity, p e ac eab len e ss, fru itfu l co m m u n ­ ication, loving kin d n ess - values without which n ot even the m ost exploitative so cial o rd er w ould su cce e d in re p ro d u cin g itself, but which are singularly absen t from the d isen ch an ted , p ost-p olitical d isco u rse o f a later m ore jeju n e brand o f an ti-totalizin g thought. A d orn o’s theory', in oth er w ords, h olds together in extrem e tension p osition s w hich in con tem porary cultural theory have beco m e ritually an tago n istic. P resen t-d ay decon struction is on the w hole eith er silent o r negative ab o u t the notion o f solidarity' - a value w ithout which no significan t so c ia l ch an ge is even conceivable, but w hich d e co n stru c­ tion ten ds to con flate in N ictzsch ean fashion with a craven conform ity to the law. O n the oth er hand, the work o f a Jü rg e n H a b e rm a s m ight b e u p b raid ed for the op p osite error, placin g too san gu in e a trust in a norm ative collective w isdom . N o one could ou td o the anti-totalizing an im u s o f a thinker who resoundingly d eclares that the w hole is the false; b u t A d o rn o is too deeply dialectical a theorist to im agine that all unity or identity is thus unequivocally terroristic. T h e given social o rd er is n o t only a m atter o f oppressive self-id e n titie s; it is also a stru ctu re o f an tagon ism , to which a certain notion o f identity m ay be critically o p p o se d . It is b e cau se so m uch p ost-stru ctu ralist thought m istakes a conflictive social system for a m onolithic one that it can con ceive o f co n se n su s o r collectivity only a s op p ressiv e. A dorn o’s own case is m o re n u an ced : ‘while firmly rejecting the ap p earan ce o f recon ciliation , art non e the le ss h old s fast to the idea o f reconciliation in an an tago n istic w orld . . . without a perspective on p e ac e art w ould be untrue, ju st a s untrue as it is when it an ticipates a state o f recon ciliation ’.24 I f it is true that ‘ the urge o f the artistic particular to be su b m e rg e d in the w hole reflects the disintegrative death wish o f n ature’,25 it is also the case that a work o f art w hich dissolved into pure m an ifo ld n ess w ould lose ‘ any sen se o f what m ak es the particular really distinctive. W orks that are in constant flux and have no unitary point o f refere n ce for the m any beco m e too h o m o g en eo u s, too m on oton o u s, too u n d ifferen tiated .,2,, Pure d iffere n ce , in sh ort, is as blank an d te d io u s a s p u re identity. An art which fails to ren der its elem en ts determinate in their irreconcilability w ould d e fu se its critical force; there can be no talk o f d ifferen ce or d isso n a n c e without som e

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provisional configurating o f the particulars in question, which would otherwise be not dissonant or conflictive but merely incom mensur­ able. ‘What we differentiate*, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, ‘will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure o f our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its dem and for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it.*27 Artefacts are internally unreconciled through a certain reconciliation, which is what leaves them irreconcilable with empirical reality: ‘the determined opposition o f every art work to empirical reality presupposes its inner coherence*.28 U n less the work has some kind o f fragile, provisional identity, one cannot speak o f its resisting political power. T h o se who indiscriminately demonize such concepts as unity, identity, consensus, regulation have forgotten that there are, after all, different modalities o f these things, which are not all equivalently repressive. In Adorno’s view, the ‘rational’ form o f art allows for a ‘non-repressive synthesis o f diverse particulars . . . it preserves them in their diffuse, divergent and contradictory condi­ tion’.29 Non-identity is constitutive o f the work o f art, but this nonidentity ‘is opaque only for identity’s claim s to be total’,30 and pure singularity is sheer abstraction. T h e general features o f the artwork em erge from its minute specifications; but this should not be taken to authorize som e brusque exorcism o f the concept, which would only surrender us to the spell o f the brute object. T h e principle o f individuation, Adorno reminds us, has its limits just like any other, and neither it nor its opposite should be ontologizcd. ‘D adaism , the deictic gesture pointing to pure thisness, was no less universal than the demonstrative pronoun “ this” .’31 Adorno takes from Kant the insight that although the work o f art is indeed a kind o f totality, it is not one which can be thought along custom ary conceptual lines. T h e Kantian aesthetic posits some peculiar imbrication o f part and whole, an intimacy which can then be read in two direcdy contrary ways. Either the whole is no more than the obedient product o f the particulars, ceaselessly generated up out o f them; or its power is now more pervasive and well-founded than ever, inscribed within each individual element as its informing structure. From this viewpoint, the very attempt to give the slip to a ‘bad* totality keels over into its opposite. K an t opens a path towards thinking totality otherwise, but remains caught within a more

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traditional logic; Adorno p resses K an t’s privileging o f the particular to an extreme limit, insisting on its recalcitrance to whatever force offers to integrate it. T h e concept o f constellation can thus be read as a political rallying cry: ‘All power to the particulars!* Yet Adorno’s aesthetics incorporates this radical program m e o f democratic selfgovernment with a more classical dominative model, at times viewing the ‘rationality* o f the art-work as non-rcpressive, at other times underlining its collusion with bureaucracy. What might undo the ‘totalitarian’ implications o f Kantian aesthetics is the idea o f affinity or m im esis - the non-sensuous correspondences between disparate features o f the artefact, or more generally the filiations o f both kinship and otherness between subject and object, humanity and nature, which might provide an alternative rationality to the instrumental. O ne might even name this mimesis allegory, that figurative mode which relates through difference, preserving the relative autonomy o f a set o f signifying units while suggesting an affinity with som e other range o f signifiers. And while this model is not broached by Adorno as explicitly political, it surely carries significant political implica­ tions. It would mean, for example, that the relations between classstruggle and sexual politics could not be conceived along the lines o f som e Lukâcsian ‘expressive totality’, but mimetically or allegorically, in a set o f correspondences which, like the constellation, take the full m easure o f otherness and disparity. I f such a theory gives no comfort to the symbolic totalizers, it will equally be resisted by those for whom affinity or correspondence can only be imagined as tyrannical ‘closure*. ‘A liberated mankind’, Adorno writes, ‘would by no means be a totality.*32 Unlike many o f his statem ents, this is an impeccably M arxist proposition. F o r Lukâcs, totality already exists in principle, but has yet to come into its own. Literary' realism prefigures that fortunate day, recreating each phenomenon in the image of the essence it belies. F o r Adorno, things are quite the reverse: there is indeed, here and now, a total system which integrates everything relentlessly down, but to emancipate non-identity from its voracious maw would be to transform this miserable situation into som e future historical ‘constellation*, in which rational identity would be con­ stituted by that hiatus within each particular which opens it to the unmasterable otherness of its fellows. Such a political order would be as far from som e ‘totalitarian* regime as it would be from some

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random distribution o f monads or flux o f sheer difference; and in this sen se there is the basis for a politics in the work o f Adorno, as there is only dubiously in that o f som e o f his theoretical successors. Adorno d oes not abandon the concept o f totality but submits it to a materialistic mutation; and this is equivalent to transforming the traditional concept o f the aesthetic, turning it against itself by redeem ing as far as possible its proto-materialist aspects from its totalizing idealism. T h is operation is then in its turn a kind o f allegory o f how the promise o f bourgeois Enlightenment - the equitable interrelation o f free, autonom ous individuals - may be salvaged from the dominative reason which is its contradictory accomplice. In the light o f this project, Jü rgen H aberm as's cursory judgement that negative dialectics leads to nothing is surely too harsh.33 Indeed H aberm as him self elsewhere applauds Adorno and Adorno’s col­ league M ax Horkheimer for the judiciousness with which their critique o f reason refuses to darken into an outright renunciation o f what the Enlightenment, however vainly, intended by the concept o f reason.34 T here are som e who would argue that, given what Adorno and Horkheimer had seen that rationality amount to in N azi G erm any, this refusal o f renunciation was either foolish or all the m ore impressive. T here are others who would argue that, given what they had seen there o f the lethal consequences o f abandoning reason, their refusal to do so was entirely understandable. Haberm as recognizes that Adorno has no desire to p ress beyond the uncomfort­ able im passe o f a reason turned back upon itself; he wishes simply to endure in the performative contradiction o f a negative dialectics, thus rem aining faithful to the echoes o f an almost forgotten non­ instrumental reason which belongs to pre-history. Like his great exem plar Sam ual Beckett, Adorno chooses to be poor but honest; he would prefer to suffer the constraints o f the tight theoretical place in which he is stuck rather than betray a m ore fundamental human sufTering by foreclosing upon these painful manoeuvres. What tattered shreds o f authenticity can be preserved after Auschwitz consist in staying stubbornly impaled on the horns o f an impossible dilem m a, conscious that the abandonment o f utopia is just as treacherous as the hope for it, that negations o f the actual are as indispensable as they are ineffectual, that art is at once precious and worthless. Adorno makes a virtue out o f agonized vulnerability, as

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though that is all honesty can these* days mean. As in the work o f Paul de M an, authenticity, if it exists at all, lies only in the gesture by which one detaches on eself ironically from all inevitably inauthentic engagem ents, opening a space between the degraded empirical subject and what would at one time have been the transcendental subject, had the latter not now been wholly undermined by the form cr.3S F o r de M an, an endless self-reflexive irony is now the nearest approach we can make to that classical transcendence, in an age when vertigo must serve as the index o f veracity. In the shift from early to late capitalism, the liberal humanist subject has indeed fallen upon hard times, and must now be prepared to sacrifice its truth and identity to its freedom, a disseverance which the Enlightenment would have found unintelligible. A dorno and de M an share, in fact, an important feature: their overreaction to fascism. T o speak o f overreacting to such a politics m ight seem strange, but is surety possible. Adorno was a victim o f fascism ; de M an, it would appear, was for a while a sympathizer. T h o se who argue for som e continuity between de M an ’s earlier and later incarnations are surely right to do so ; but the continuity in question is largely negative, a matter o f the later de M an’s extreme reaction to his earlier involvements. T h e later de M an, traumatized by the philosophy o f transcendental signification, metaphysical groundedness and rem orseless totalization with which he had earlier consorted, lapses into a jaded liberal scepticism in som e ways close to A dorno’s own political pessim ism , though without its frail utopian im pulse. Both figures would seem afflicted for quite different reasons by a paralysing historical guilt, and would prefer to court impotence, deadlock and failure rather than risk the dogm atism o f affirmation. Both positions, moreover, have to som e extent always already incorporated their own hopelessness, a move which am ong other things renders them less vulnerable to certain impatient accusations. In Minima M oralia, that bizarre blend o f probing insight and patrician grousing, Adorno mourns the disappearance from m odem civilization o f doors that close ‘quietly and discreetly’, in one o f his tiresom e bouts o f haut bourgeois anti-technological nostalgia: ‘What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casem ent windows to open, but only sliding fram es to shove, no gentle latches but tum able handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?’36 One knows, even before the eye has travelled to

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the next sen te n ce , that a referen ce to the N azis will b e on its way, which in d e ed im m ediately a p p ears: ‘T h e m ovem en ts m achines dem an d o f th eir u se rs already have the violent, hard-hitting, u n restin g je rk in e ss o f F a sc ist m altreatm en t.’ T h a t the m an who could so vigilantly s n iff out in stan ces o f the banalization o f fascism , from B rech t to C h ap lin , sh ould perm it h im se lf this trivializing constellation su g g e sts that w e sh o u ld evaluate with som e circu m sp ection the political re sp o n se s o f a form er victim o f fascism . In one se n se , nobody could co m m an d m ore authority an d resp ect; in an oth er sen se, the h orror o f that experien ce lin gers thoughout A dorn o’s later work as a d istortin g a s w ell a s illum inating perspective. S o m eth in g o f the sam e m ight be said o f P aul de M an , d esp ite the entirely differen t n ature o f his im plication in the N azi p eriod. H is later th ought m ust be exam ined in th e light o f his earlier career in m uch the sa m e way that the d eclaratio n s o f a positivist o r behaviourist m ust be co n sid ered in the context o f h is revulsion from an earlier E van gelicalism . It is by now w idely agreed that A dorn o’s experience o f fascism led him an d o th er m em b ers o f the Fran kfu rt school to travesty and m isrecogn ize som e o f the sp ecific p ow er-stru ctu res o f liberal capitalism , p ro jectin g the m inatory shadow o f the fo rm er sort o f regim e upon the quite differen t institutions o f the latter. M uch the sam e co n fu sion is inherited by som e post-stru ctu ralist theory, with its perilously in discrim in ate conflation o f widely divergent o rd e rs o f pow er, form s o f o p p ressio n an d m odalities o f law. T h e breathtaking subtlety o f A d o rn o ’s d isq u isition s on art are in inverse proportion to the tw o-d im en sion al crudity o f som e o f his political perception s. In d eed th ese two facets o f his thought are closely intertw ined, as a defeatist p olitics gen erates a com pen satorily rich aesth etics. Even then, how ever, it m ust be rem em bered that A d o rn o ’s historical p e ssim ism is alw ays tem pered by a vision, how ever ragged and th readb are, o f the ju st society'. ‘T h e only philosophy w hich can be respon sib ly p ra ctise d in face o f d e sp a ir’, read s the con cludin g, Benjam inian section o f M inim a Moralia> ‘is the attempt to contemplate all things as they w ould p resen t them selves from the stan dpoin t o f redem ption . K n o w led g e h as no light but that sh ed on the w orld by redem p tion ; all else is recon struction , m ere tech n ique. Perspectives m ust be fash ion ed that d isp lace an d estran ge the w orld, reveal it to b e , with its rifts an d crevices, as indigent and d isto rted a s it will ap p ea r on e d ay in the m essian ic light.’37 T h e r e can be no dou bt that

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A dorn o b elieves devoutly in the good society, sin ce how otherw ise could he exp erien ce the m isery o f its absen ce q u ite so keenly? H is d esp air, th en , is alw ays an intricately qualified affair, ju st as his n otorious cu ltural elitism is severely tem pered by th e read in e ss he show s to sav ag e a representative o f high culture alo n gsid e an avatar o f the cu lture industry. T h e r e a re , p e rh ap s, two differen t A d orn os, th e one som ew hat m ore d e featist than the other. It is p ossib le to re ad his work a s a retreat fro m the nigh tm are o f history into the aesth etic, and there is enough in h is w ritings to m ake this a plausible view. It is the m ost easily caricatu red sid e o f his thought: B eckett and S c h o e n b e rg as the solution to w orld starvation an d threatened nuclear destru ction . T h is is the A d orn o who deliberately o ffers as a solution w hat is clearly part o f the p ro b lem , the political hom eopath who will fe ed u s sick n e ss as cu re. T h is A d o rn o ask s us sim ply to su b sist in the n ear-in tolerab le strain o f an ab su rd ist, self-im p lo d in g thought, a th ought before which all h u b ristic sy stem -b u ild ers m ust hum ble th em selves, and which in its extrem e d isco m fort k eep s u s loyal at som e lofty rem ove to the ch aracteristic s tu ff o f hum an history. B u t there is also the other A dorn o w ho still h op es that we m ight go through the aesth etic and com e out in som e un n am eable place on the oth er sid e , the theorist for whom th e aesth etic o ffers a p arad igm , rather th an a displacem en t o f em an cipatory political th o u gh t.’* In Negative Dialectics, A dorn o sp eak s out explicitly again st any attem pt to aesth eticize philosophy. ‘ A philosophy th at tried to im itate art, that w ould turn itse lf into a work o f art, w ould be expun gin g itself.’39 A S ch ellin g ian solution, in oth er w ords, is n ot to be p u rsu e d ; but som ew hat later in the volume A d om o is writing in Schopcnhauerian vein o f ph ilosoph y a s ‘a true sister o f m usic . . . its su sp e n d e d state is nothing but the exp ressio n o f its in expressibilityV u A s the playful and sen suou s, the aesthetic is not, A d om o insists, accidental to philosophy; there is a kind o f clow nish elem en t about know ing th ought’s rem o ten ess fro m its o b ject yet sp eak in g as though one had that object assu re d ly in han d, an d theory m ust som ehow act out this tragicom ic discrepancy', fo regrou n din g its own u n fin ish edn ess. A s a form o f thought w h ose o b ject m ust always elu d e it, there is som eth in g a little bu ffoon ish a b o u t this m onarch o f the hum anities. B u t if A d o m o w ants to aesth eticize theory in style and form , he is not prep ared to void the cognitive, for ‘cogen cy and play are the two p o les o f

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philosophy’, and ‘ (philosophy’s] affinity to art does not entide it to borrow from art, least o f all by virtue o f the intuitions which barbarians take for the prerogatives o f art’.41 T h e theoretical concept, however, m ust not relinquish the sensuous yearning which animates the artistic, even if it tends to negate that yearning. ‘Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor subm it to it. It must strive, by way o f the concept, to transcend the concept.’42 T h e re can be no question for Adorno o f aestheticizing philosophy in the sense o f reducing cognition to intuition, since art for him is itse lf in its peculiar way a form o f rationality. Where theory is to be aestheticized is in its approach to the particular; art does not exactly ou st systematic thought, but furnishes it with a model o f sensuous receptivity to the specific. T h is, however, poses an intriguing problem . F o r how can philosophy learn from the aesthetic if the whole point o f the latter is to be strictly untranslatable into discursiv e thought? T h e aesthetic would seem to offer itself as a paradigm for a thought into which it refuses to be translated back. Art shows what philosophy cannot say; but either philosophy will never be able to articulate this, in which case the aesthetic is o f dubious relevance to it, or it can learn to express the inexpressible, in which case it may no longer be theory but a form o f art. Art would thus seem at once the consum m ation and the ruin o f philosophy - the point to which any authentic thought m ust asymptotically aspire, yet where it would cease to be in any traditional sense thought at all. On the other hand, the shift from the theoretical to the aesthetic, from a dominative reason to a mimetic one, cannot involve a definitive rupture, since as we have seen art itself contains an ineluctable moment o f domination. Art’s deconstruction o f theory is never entirely successful, so that philosophy will live on within its other. J u s t as artistic modernism figures the impossibility o f art, so Adorno’s modernist aesthetic marks the point at which the high aesthetic tradition is pressed to an extreme limit and begins to selfdestruct, leaving among its ruins a few cryptic clues as to what might lie beyond it. Yet this undermining o f classical aesthetics is achieved from within the aesthetic, and owes much to the lineages it throws into crisis. Adorno continues to occupy the high ground o f aesthetic theory', rather than descending like H aberm as to the more hospitable lowlands o f a communicative rationality. H e would rather stifle than suffocate, and in whole reaches o f his work the air feels too rarefied to

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su stain m uch biological growth. H e begin s neither from the g oo d old th in gs nor th e b ad new things, to adopt a rem ark o f B re ch t’s, but from the b ad o ld things, from a history which h as b een racked and torm en ted sin c e its inception. A ccord in g to Dialectic o f Enlightenment even O d y sse u s w as a b o u rgeo is individualist, and A d am w as no doubt an oth er. T h e only authentic h ope is one w rested from the know ledge that th in gs have b een atrociou s for a very long tim e, a hope which risks su p p re ssin g that know ledge and so becom in g inauthentic. Only by re m ain in g faithful to the p ast can we p rise loose its terrifying grip, and this fidelity is forever likely to paralyse us. It is a problem o f how one alleviates an d k eep s faith with su fferin g at the sam e tim e, since the on e is alw ays th reatening to un dercut the other. I f A dorno p lies the steel h e d o e s so as a w ounded su rgeo n , patient and physician togeth er; a n d his in ju ries, as W ittgenstein m ight have said, are the b ru ises he h as su stain ed from trying to run his h ead up again st the lim its o f lan g u ag e. T h e only cure for ou r sick n ess is that it should grow w orse - that the w ounds inflicted on hum anity by its own insanity sh o u ld be left festerin g and un ten ded, for w ithout their silent testim ony to o u r historical plight we will forget that a rem edy is even n ecessary a n d thus e scap e into innocence. T h e ragg ed g ap which a predatory re aso n h as driven through o u r in ner n ature m ust be kept open , for it is only in this vacant sp ac e that so m eth in g m ore creative m ight ju st germ in ate, an d w hat we m ight s tu ff it with w ould only be illusion. T h in g s at the w orst, a s Macbeth rem in ds u s, will eith er cease o r clim b u p again ; an d A dorn o p osition s his w riting at this u n d ecidab le point, p re p a re d to b ack neither possibility. L ik e F re u d , he know s th at individual p articu lars will never rest content u n d er the law ’s yoke, th at the central tenet o f traditional a esth etics is a lie; and this friction betw een p art an d w hole is the sou rce o f both h ope and d e sp air, the ren d in g without which nothing can be so le or w hole, but w hich m ay well su cce e d in d e ferrin g su ch w h olen ess to ju d gem en t day. T h e aesth e tic, which w as once a kind o f resolution, is now a sca n d a lo u s im possibility'; an d A dorn o’s m ost ironic m ove will be to dep loy this very im possibility a s a device for renew ing the tradition o f which it is th e last faint gasp . A s thought m ust travel beyon d itse lf so m ust the aesth e tic tran scen d itself, em ptying itse lf o f its authoritarian u rg e s an d offensively affirm ative instincts until it leaves behind nothing bu t a ghostly negative im print o f itself, which is probably the n earest we sh a ll g et to truth.

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Ever}' generation, Benjamin writes, has been endowed with a lweak M essianic power’.43 T h e revolutionary historian scans the past for this frail salvific im pulse, fanning the sparks o f hope still stirring am ong its ashes. Adorno is Kabbalistic enough to decipher the signs o f redem ption in the m ost wildly im probable places - in the paranoia o f identity-thinking, in the mechanisms o f exchange-value, between the elliptical lines o f a Beckett or in som e sudden jarring o f a Sch oenberg violin. History is awash with the desire for justice and well-being, clam ouring for judgem ent day, labouring to overthrow itself; it is shot through with weak M essianic powers, if only one learns to search for them in the least obvious places. But there is, o f course, always another story. I f Adorno can detect the longing for happiness in som e bureaucratic edict, he is also depressingly skilful at discerning the rapaciousness which lurks within our most edifying gestures. T h ere can be no truth without ideology*, no transcendence without betrayal, no beneficence which is not bought at the cost o f another’s happiness. If the skein o f history is meshed as fine as this, then to tug on any one thread o f it is to risk unravelling som e rare design in the name o f unpicking an obstructive knot. Textuality, with A dorno as with som e later theorists, thus becomes a rationale for political intertia; praxis is a crude, blundering afTair, which could never live up to the exquisite m any-sidedness o f our theoretical insights. It is remarkable how this A m oldian doctrine is still alive and well today, occasionally in the most ‘radical’ o f circles. It is no use, however, telling Adorno that Webern will never do anything for the world economy. H e knows it already, better even than us, and is more concerned to rub the ridiculousness o f his doctrines in our face than to defend them. In Zen-like fashion, it is only when w-e have grasped their absurdity' that illumination might break upon us. I f som e later theorists have been able to practise this provocative style even more effectively than Adorno himself, it is largely because they lack his profound sen se o f political responsibility. Adorno recognized the necessity o f that style; but he never failed to meditate on its intolerable privilege too, which is what marks him o ff from a post-Auschwitz generation. If he ironized and equivocated, it w as not with som e feckless sub-N ietzschean zest but with a heavy heart. It is ironic in its turn that this nostalgic haut bourgeois intellectual, with all his mandarin fastidiousness and rem orseless tunnel vision, should join the ranks o f M ikhail Bakhtin and Walter

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B en jam in a s on e o f the three m ost creative, original cu ltural theorists M arx ism h as yet p rod u ced .

Notes 1 T heodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London, 1973)* p. 35. 2 Ibid., p. 146. 3 Ibid., p. 365. 4 Ibid., p. 320. 5 T h eod or Adorno, Minima Moralia (London, 1974), p. 237. 6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 148. 7 Ibid., p. 149. 8 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5. 9 Ibid., p. 120. 10 Ibid., p. 23. 11 Ibid., p. 85. 12 Ibid., p. 111. 13 Ibid., pp. 33 and 162. 14 Ibid., p. 47. 15 Ibid., p. 83. 16 S ee on this point Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London, 1987), p. 30. 17 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), p. 325. 18 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1977), p. 194. 19 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 27. 20 Ibid., p. 74. 21 Ibid., p. 193. 22 Ibid., p. 333. 23 An excellent account o f this topic is given by Peter Osborne, ‘Adorno and the M etaphysics o f Modernism* in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Problem of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London, 1988). 24 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 48 and 366. 25 Ibid., p. 78. 26 Ibid., p. 273. 27 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 5 -6 . 28 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory>, p. 225. 29 Ibid., p. 207. 30 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 153. 31 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 259.

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32 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London, 1976), p. 12. 33 See Peter Dews (ed.)» Jürgen Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity (London, 1986), p. 91. 34 Ibid., pp. 154-5. 35 See Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, 1983), p. 214. 36 Adorno, Minima Moraiia, p. 40. 37 Ibid., p. 247. 38 For a critical account of Adorno’s use o f the aesthetic as political paradigm, see Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Reason, Utopia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment\ in R. J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cam­ bridge, 1985). 39 Adorno, Negative Dialecticst p. 15. 40 Ibid., p. 109. 41 Ibid., p. 15. 42 Ibid., p. 15. 43 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy o f History’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London, 1973), p. 256.

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14 From the Polis to Postmodernism L e t u s tell, in cru d e an d fabular form , a W eberian kind o f story. Im agine a society som etim e in the indeterm inate p a st, before the rise o f cap italism , p erh ap s even before the F a ll, certainly before the disso ciatio n o f sensibility', when the three g re a t qu estion s o f philosophy - what can we know? what ough t we to do? w hat do we find attractive? - w ere not a s yet fully d istin gu ish able from one another. A society, that is to say, w here the three m ighty regions o f the cognitive, the ethico-political an d the libidin al-aesthetic w ere still to a large extent in term esh ed. K n ow ledge w as still con strained by certain m oral im peratives - there w ere certain th in gs you w eren ’t su p p o se d to know - an d w as not viewed a s sh eerly instrum ental. T h e eth ico-political q u estion - w hat are we to do? - w as not regarded sim ply as a m atter o f intuition or existential decisio n o r inexplicable preferen ce, but involved rigorous know ledge o f what we w ere, o f the structure o f ou r social life; so that there w as a way o f describin g what wc w ere from which it w as p ossib le to infer what we sh ould d o or could b eco m e. A rt w as not sharply separated from the ethicopolitical, b u t w as one o f its prim ary m edia; and it w as not easily distin gu ish able from the cognitive either, becau se it co u ld b e see n as a form o f social know ledge, co n d u cted within certain norm ative ethical fram ew orks. It had cognitive functions an d ethico-political effects. T h e n im agin e, after a while, all this changing. T h e snake enters the gard en ; th e m iddle c lasse s start to rise; thoughts fall apart from feelin gs, so that nobody thinks through their fingertips any m ore; and history sta rts out on its lon g trek tow ards M r G e o rg e B u sh . T h e three great areas o f historical life - know ledge, politics, d esire - are

FROM THE PO I.IS TO POSTMODERNISM

uncoupled from one another; each becom es specialized, autonomous, sealed o ff into its own space. Know ledge burst out o f its ethical constraints and began to operate by its own internal autonom ous laws. U n d er the name science, it no longer bore any obvious relation to the ethical or aesthetic, and so began to lose touch with value. About this time, philosophers began to discover that you could not derive a value from a fact. F o r classical thought, to answer the question ‘what am I to do?' involved making reference to my actual place within the social relations o f the polisy and the rights and responsibilities which that brought along with it. A normative language was bound up with a cognitive one. Now, however, the answers to why we should be moral becom e non-cognitivist. Either: you ought to be moral because doesn't it feel nice to be good? O r: you should be moral because it is moral to be so. Both o f these responses utilize, in very different ways, the model o f the aesthetic, which at about this time was also floating adrift into its own autonomous space, and so could be drawn upon as a kind o f m odel o f ethical autonomy. T h e moral and the aesthetic, both in deep trouble, could thus come to one another’s aid. T h e cultural system had detached itself from the economic and political system s, and thus cam e to figure as an end in itself. Indeed art had to be an end in itself, because it certainly didn’t seem to have much else o f a purpose any more. T h is story may seem yet another ritual o f nostalgic remembrance for the organic society, but in fact it is not. F o r why should we presum e that the condition in which these three discourses were interm eshed was a positive one? Liberated from cram ping theological constraint, knowledge may now steam ahead and probe into what was previously taboo, relying on no authority but its own critical, sceptical pow ers. Scien ce becom es a revolutionary strike against the statesm en and high priests in the name o f human welfare and intellectual independence. Ethical enquiry is no longer exclusively harnessed to the ecclesial apparatus, but is free to raise questions o f human justice and dignity beyond this narrow scope. Art, too, can now cease to be a m ere lackey o f political power, swearing fidelity only to its own law; but this is not grcady disturbing, since the very social conditions which allow this to happen - the autonomization o f culture - also prevent art’s potentially subversive freedom from having much o f an effect on other areas o f social life. Art com es to signify pure su p p le m en tary , that marginal region o f the affective/instinctual/

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non-instrum ental which a reified rationality finds difficulty in incorporating. But because it has becom e an isolated enclave, it can act as a kind o f safety-valve or sublimation o f these otherwise dangerous reaches o f the psyche. T h e moment we are speaking o f is the moment o f modernity, characterized by the dissociation and specialization o f these three crucial spheres o f activity. Art is now autonom ous o f the cognitive, ethical and political; but the way it came to be so is paradoxical. It becam e autonom ous o f them, curiously enough, by being integrated into the capitalist mode o f production. When art becom es a commodity, it is released from its traditional social functions within church, court and state into the anonymous freedom o f the market place. Now it exists, not for any specific audience, but just for anybody with the taste to appreciate it and the money to buy it. And in so far as it exists for nothing and nobody in particular, it can be said to exist for itself. It is ‘independent* because it has been swallowed up by comm odity production. Art itself may thus be an increasingly marginal pursuit, but aesthetics is not. Indeed one might risk the rather exaggerated formulation that aesthetics is bom at the moment o f art’s effective dem ise as a political force, flourishes on the corpse o f its social relevance. T hough artistic production itself plays less and less o f a significant role in the social order (M arx reminds us that the bourgeoisie have absolutely no time for it), what it is able to bequeath to that order, as it were, is a certain ideological model which may help it out o f its m ess - the m ess which has marginalized pleasure and the body, reified reason, and struck morality entirely empty. T h e aesthetic offers to reverse this division o f labour, to bring these three alienated regions back into touch with one another, but the price it dem ands for this generosity is high: it offers to interrelate these discourses by effectively swallowing up the other two. Everything should now becom e aesthetic. T ruth, the cognitive, becom es that which satisfies the mind, or what helps us to move around the place rather more conveniently. Morality is converted to a matter o f style, pleasure and intuition. How should one live one’s life properly? By turning on eself into an artefact. T h e re is finally the question o f politics. H ere the aestheticizing lineage can take either a left or a right turn. T h e left turn: smash truth, cognition and morality, which are all just ideology, and live

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luxuriantly in th e free, g ro u n d less play o f your creative pow ers. T h e right tu rn , fro m B urke an d C o le rid g e to H e id e g g e r, Y e a ts an d Eliot: fo rget abo u t th eoretical an alysis, clin g to the sen su o u sly particular, view society a s a self-g ro u n d in g organ ism , all o f w hose parts m iraculously in terpen etrate w ithout conflict and req u ire no rational justification . T h in k with the bloo d an d the body. R em em b er that tradition is alw ays w iser an d rich er than on e’s own p o o r, pitiable ego. It is this line o f d esce n t, in one o f its tributaries, which w ill lead to the T h ird R eich . It all b eg in s with the work o f art, and e n d s up with a scarecro w in a field. T h e left-aesth e tic tradition, from S ch ille r and M arx to iMorris and M a rc u se , h as m u ch to b e said fo r it: art as critique o f alien ation , as an exem plary’ realization o f creative pow ers, a s the ideal reconciliation o f su b ject and o b jc ct, universal an d particular, freedom an d necessity, theory an d p ractice, individual an d society. All o f these n otion s could be equ ally d ep loy ed by the political right; but while the b o u rg eo isie is still in its p ro g ressiv e p h ase , this style o f thinking c o m e s through a s a pow erfully positive utopian ism . F ro m the en d o f th e nineteenth century, how ever, this h eritage begin s to turn sou r, an d this is the m om ent o f m od ern ism . M o d ern ism is on e o f the in h eritors o f this radical aesth eticizin g, but in the negative m ode: art, in A dorn o’s pregn an t p h ra se , a s the ‘ negative know ledge o f reality’. M o d e rn ism in art, an d later th e Fran kfu rt school and p o st-stru ctu ralism in theory: these are h e lp e d o ff the groun d b e cau se the m ore positive aesthetic tradition h as run out o f steam , found the system to o pow erful to break. W e a r e now m oving into late cap italism , into a n apparently wholly reified, rationalized, adm in istered regim e. You c a n ’t brin g it to its kn ees with organ ic craftsm an sh ip , so you have to try instead the silent scream , the scream which in M un ch ’s fam ous painting rips open the blank face o f the solitary figure and reverberates en d lessly around the can vas. T h e aesth etic b e co m e s the guerilla tactics o f secret subversion , o f silent resistan ce, o f stubborn refusal. Art will pulverize traditional fo rm an d m ean in g, b e cau se the laws o f syntax and g ram m ar are the law s o f the police. It will d an ce on the grave o f narrative, se m a n tic s an d represen tation , celebrate m ad n e ss and d elirium , sp e a k like a w om an, dissolve all social d ialectics into the free flow o f d e sire . Its form will becom e its content - a form which re p u lse s all so c ia l sem an tics an d m ight ju st allow u s a glim pse o f what it m ight con ceivably be like to be free. B ut at the sa m e m om ent this

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art is fearful and wretched, blank and listless, old enough to rem em ber a time when there was order, truth and reality and still to som e degree nostalgically in thrall to them. From Romanticism to modernism, art strives to turn to advantage the autonomy which its commodity status has forced upon it, m aking a virtue out o f grim necessity. Autonomy in the worrying sen se - social functionlessness - is wrenched into autonomy in a m ore productive sen se: art as a deliberate turning in upon itself, as a m ute gesture o f resistance to a social order which, in Adorno’s phrase, holds a gun to its head. Aesthetic autonomy becom es a kind o f negative politics. Art, like humanity, is utterly, gloriously useless, perhaps the one non-reified, non-instrumentalized form o f activity left. In post-structuralist theory this will becom e the trace or aporia or ineffable flicker o f difference which eludes all formalization, that giddy moment o f failure, slippage or jouissance where you m ight just glimpse, in som e necessarily empty, unspeakable way, som ething beyond the prison house o f metaphysics. Such a truth, as W ittgenstein might have said, can be shown but not spoken; and this negative aesthetics thus proves too feeble a basis on which to found a politics. T h e re would then seem only one route left open, and that is an art which rejects the aesthetic. An art against itself, which confesses the impossibility o f art, like those full-blown postm odernist theories which proclaim the impossibility o f theory. A n art, in short, which will undo all this depressing history, which will go right back even before the beginning, before the dawning o f the whole category o f the aesthetic, and seek to override in its own way that moment at the birth o f modernity when the cognitive, ethico-political and libidinalaesthetic becam e uncoupled from one another. T h is time, however, it will seek to do it not in the m anner o f the radical aestheticizers, by the aesthetic colonizing these other two regions, but by folding the aesthetic into the other two system s, in an attem pt to hook art up once again with social praxis. T h is is the revolutionary avant garde. T h e avant garde proclaims: you can’t do it by aesthetics, aesthetics is part o f the problem, not o f the solution. T h e problem o f art is art itself, so let’s have an a n which isn’t art. Down with libraries and m useum s, paint your pictures on

people’s pyjamas, read your poetry through megaphones in factory yards, lead the audience on the town hall when the play is over, leave

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your stu d io s a n d g o out into the factories (as som e o f the Bolsh evik avant g ard e actu ally did) to m ake u sefu l ob jects for th e w orkers. F o r n egative aesth etician s like A dorn o, th is is un m itigated c a ta ­ stroph e. F o r i f art sm a sh e s through the form al co n to u rs which dem arcate a n d e stran g e it from ordinary life, will it not sim ply su c c e e d in sp illin g an d d efu sin g its critical con tents? H ow can a stoutly fa sh io n ed C on structivist rockin g-ch air act as critiq u e? F ro m this view poin t, the avant g arde is sim ply the latest in stan ce o f o u r old friend in fan tile ultra-leftism , rebelliou s children see k in g to outrage their n o t-all-th at-sh o ck ab lc paren ts. All o f this can be p ictured as a kind o f narrative p ro g ressio n . F irst, in a som ew h at naive m om ent, you im agine that you m igh t subvert the given o rd er by certain aesth etic contents. B ut exactly b e c a u se these are in telligible, tran slucen t, faithful to the law s o f g ram m ar, they fall victim to the very social logic they op p o se. It m ay be radical, bu t at least it’s art. It m ay represen t the unpalatable, but at least it d o e s so with a scru p u lo u s fidelity which a ssu a g e s the m iddle c la s s ’s p o rn o ­ graph ic ap p etite for the real. S o you can sh ed content a n d leave only form b eh in d , w hich in its m ore positive m om ent holds out a prom ise o f h ap p in ess an d o rgan ic reconciliation, an d in its m ore negative m om en t tra c e s a ja g g ed line o f inarticulable oppo sitio n to the given. Any su ch fo rm , how ever, will fall instantly u n d er the ju dgem en t o f what M a r c u se on ce called ‘affirm ative cu ltu re’, A rt’s very artistry, even i f that is now a q u estion o f p u re form , e ffe cts a sp u rio u s sort o f sublim ation w hich will bin d an d con fiscate the very e n e rg ie s it h opes to re le ase for the p u rp o se s o f political ch an ge. W e stu m b le upon the con tradiction o f all u top ian ism , that its very im age s o f harm ony threaten to h ijack the radical im p u lses they h ope to p rom ote, S o form m ust g o too, how ever p ure and empty . A nd this leaves u s with an ti­ art, an art w hich is not ap p rop riable by the ru lin g o rd er b e cau se - the final cu n n in g - it isn ’t art at all. T h e p rob lem with th is, how ever, is that w hat can n ot be ap p rop riated and institutionalized b e cau se it re fu ses to d ista n ce itse lf from social practice in the first place m ay by the sam e token abolish all critical point o f p u rch ase u p o n social life. L ik e the left-aesth e tic lin eage, the avant g arde h as two m om ents, on e negative a n d on e positive. T h e negative asp ect is p e rh a p s the best know n: sh ock, ou trage, m ou stach es on the M o n a L isa . It is difficult to b a se a politics on it, and d ifficult to d o it twice. T h is cu rren t o f the avant gard e tak e s up the negative aesth etic o f m o d ern ism and

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destroys meaning. What is it, in the end, that the bourgeoisie cannot take? M eaninglessness. D on ’t strike at this or that bit o f ideological m eaning, for if you do you stay within the orbit o f orthodoxy; strike instead at the very structure and matrix o f meaning, and confound ideology in this scandalous way. T here is also the positive moment o f the avant garde, that o f Brecht rather than D ada. T h is proclaims: there is indeed a way o f resisting incorporation by the ruling order, whatever the fashionable jerem iads about how they will simply hang Picassos on the walls o f their banks. T h at, claims this avant garde trend, is not the point. I f they can place your revolutionary artefacts in their banks then that means only one thing: not that you were not iconoclastic or experimental enough, but that either your art was not deeply enough rooted in a revolutionary political movement, or it was, but that this m ass movement failed. How idealist to imagine that art, all by itself, could resist incorporation! T h e question o f appropriation h as to do with politics, not with culture; it is a question o f who is winning at any particular time. I f they win, continue to govern, then it is n o doubt true that there is nothing which they cannot in principle defuse and contain. I f you win, they will not be able to appropriate a thing because you will have appropriated them. T h e one thing which the bourgeoisie cannot incorporate is its own political defeat. L et them try hanging that on the walls o f their banks. T h e negative avant garde tries to avoid such absorption by not producing an object. N o artefacts: just gestures, happenings, manifestations, disruptions. You cannot integrate that which consum es itself in the moment o f production. T h e positive avant garde understands that the question o f integration stands or falls with the destiny o f a m ass political movement. T h e avant garde’s response to the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic is quite unequivocal. T ruth is a lie; morality stinks; beauty is shit. And o f course they are absolutely right. T ruth is a White H ouse com m uniqué; morality is the M oral M ajority; beauty is a naked woman advertising perfume. Equally, o f course, they are wrong. T ru th , morality and beauty are too important to be handed contemptuously over to the political enemy. T h e avant garde failed, rolled back by Stalinism and fascism .1 Som e time later, Ulysses entered the university syllabuses and Schoenberg sidled regularly into the concert halls. T h e institutionalization o f

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m od ern ism h ad set in. B u t the social o rd er on w hich m odernism turned its b ack w as rapidly ch an gin g too. It w as n o lo n ger sim ply ‘civil society’ , the realm o f appetite, utility and instrum ental reason to be co u n terp osed to ‘cu ltu re’; with the developm ent o f co n su m er cap italism , it to o b e cam e pervasively aesth eticized. T h e w holesale aesth eticizatio n o f society had found its grotesq u e ap o th e o sis for a b r ie f m om ent in fascism , with its panoply o f m yths, sym bols and orgiastic sp e c ta c le s, its repressive expressivity, its a p p eals to passion, racial intuition, instinctual ju d gem en t, the sublim ity o f self-sacrifice and the p u lse o f the blood. B u t in the p ost-w ar years a differen t form o f aesth eticization w as also to saturate the entire cu ltu re o f late capital, with its fetish ism o f style and su rface , its cult o f h ed o n ism and tech n iq u e, its reifying o f the signifier and d isp lacem en t o f discursive m ean in g with random intensities. In its early sta g e s, capitalism had sharply sev ered the sym bolic from the econ om ic; now the two sp h eres are in con gru ously reun ited , as the econ om ic p en etrates deeply into the sym bolic realm itself, an d the libidinal body is h arn e sse d to the im peratives o f profit. W e w ere now, so we wrere told, in the era o f p o stm o d ern ism . From a radical viewpoint, the case for the defence o f postm odernism m ight go rou gh ly a s follow s. P ostm od ern ism rep re sen ts the latest iconoclastic u p su rg e o f the avant gard e, with its dem o tic co n fou ndin g o f h ierarch ies, its self-reflexive subversion s o f ideological closu re, its p o p u list d e b u n k in g o f intellectualism and elitism . I f th at so u n d s a little too e u p h oric, on e m ay always try instead the case for the p rosecu tion , d raw in g attention to p ostm o d ern ism ’s con sum erist h edon ism an d philistine an ti-historicism , its w holesale aban don m en t o f critique a n d com m itm en t, its cynical erasu re o f truth, m eaning and subjectivity1, its blank, reified technologism . It can b e a rg u e d that the first description is true o f certain currents o f p o stm o d ern ism , an d the seco n d true o f certain oth ers. T h is c a se is true a s far a s it g o e s, bu t som ew hat boring. T h e m ore in terestin g case would be to claim that, in many if not all postm odernist m anifestations, both d e scrip tio n s apply sim ultaneously. M u ch p ostm o d ern ist culture is both radical and conservative, icon oclastic and in corporated, in the sam e breath . T h is is so b e cau se o f a contradiction betw een the econ om ic an d cu ltural fo rm s o f late capitalist society, o r, m ore sim ply betw een cap italist econom y an d b o u rgeo is culture. B o u rg eo is culture o f a tradition al h um anistic kind ten ds to value hierarchy, distinction,

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unique identity; what threatens constantly to undermine this exquisitely w ell-ordered structure is not so much the political left as the cavortings o f the commodity. T h e commodity, as we have seen in the work o f M arx, is transgressive, prom iscuous, polymorphous; in its sublim e self-expansiveness, its levelling passion to exchange with another o f its kind, it offers paradoxically to bring low the very finely nuanced superstructure - call it ‘culture* - which serves in part to protect and promote it. T h e commodity is the ruin o f all distinctive identity, craftily conserving the difference o f use-value but only by dint o f sublating it to that sameness-in-difTerence which for Walter Benjam in was fashion. It transmutes social reality to a wilderness o f m irrors, as one object contemplates the abstract essence o f itself in the looking glass o f another, and that in another. T raversing with superb indifference the divisions o f class, sex and race, o f high and low, past and present, the commodity appears as an anarchic, iconoclastic force which mocks the obsessive rankings o f traditional culture even as it in som e sense depends upon them to secure the stable conditions for its own operations. Like much postm odernist culture, the commodity integrates high and low'; but how progressive a gesture this is is radically ambiguous. F o r the question o f an ‘elitist’ or a ‘popular* art, one aesthetically aloof from everyday life as against one which em braces the motifs o f comm on experience, cannot be posed in a purely formal, abstract way, in disregard for the kind o f comm on experience at issue. An art which espouses the Lebenswelt o f L a s Vegas is not the sam e as one which takes to the streets o f Leningrad; a postm odernism which responds to local community n eeds, in art or architecture, differs from one which takes its cue from the m arket place T h ere is no automatic virtue in the ‘integration’ o f culture and common life, any more than there is in their dissociation. From N ietzsche onwards, the ‘base’ o f capitalist society begins to enter into em barrassing contradiction with its ‘superstructure’. T h e legitim ating form s o f high bourgeois culture, the versions and definitions o f subjectivity which they have to offer, appear less and less adequate to the experience o f late capitalism, but on the other hand cannot merely be abandoned. T h e mandarin culture o f the high bourgeois epoch is progressively called into question by the later evolution o f that very social system, but rem ains at certain ideological levels indispensable. It is indispensable partly because the subject as unique, autonom ous, self-identical and self-determ ining remains a

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political and ideological requirement o f the sy stem, but partly becausc the commodity' is incapable o f generating a sufficiently legitimating ideology o f its own. D iscourses o f G od* freedom and family, o f the unique spiritual essence o f the individual, retain much o f their traditional force, but come also to have som ething o f an implausible ring to them, in a social order where the highest empirical value is clearly profit. T h e United States, which tends to wear its ideology' on its sleeve in contrast to the more oblique and ‘naturalized* ideological m odes o f Europe, is then a particularly striking instance o f this discrepancy , in which the conflict between high-sounding metaphysical claptrap and having your fingers in the till bulks farcically large. N ietzsche’s alarmingly radical solution to this dilemma - forget about the metaphysics and celebrate unashamedly the will to power - had necessarily to be rejected by the bourgeoisie, since it deprived them o f too many o f their traditional legitimating form s. Better to appear a hypocrite than to cut the ground from under one’s feet. T h e radical credentials o f an assault on elitist culture, in this situation at least, are likely to be somewhat ambiguous. It is not only that such culture itself contains m eanings and values which may becom e available for a radical critique; it it also that a transgression o f the frontiers between high and low, esoteric and demotic, lies in the very nature o f capitalism itself. F o r M arx, it is part o f the emancipatory dynamic o f that society’ to dism antle all sacred spaces, m ix a plurality o f idioms, and strip the object’s aura o f uniqueness to the compulsive repetition o f mechanical reproduction. As Bertolt Brecht once remarked, it is capitalism that is radical, not communism. T h is is not o f course to argue that all subversions o f elitist culture are politically unavailing; it is simply to point up the degree o f complicity' between som e such gestures and the capitalist system itself. Bourgeois society rates culture extremely highly and has no time for it whatsover; to assail a sequestered art may thus signify a genuinely radical strategy at the very moment it risks reproducing the logic o f what it opposes. T h is is not, it should be said, a contradiction to which the more ebullient apologists o f postm odernism seem particularly sensitive. A work like Jo yce’s Ulysses is at its m ost scandalous and subversive in Its critique o f the bourgeois myth o f immanent meaning. As the type o f all anti-auratic texts, a mechanical recycling o f a sacred document, Ulysses pulverizes this mythology by' eroding the distinctions

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between high and low, holy and profane, past and present, authenticity and derivativeness, and does so with all the demotic vulgarity o f the commodity itself. Franco M oretti has pointed out how ruthlessly Ulysses commodifies discourse itself, reducing the bourgeois ideology o f ‘unique style* to a ceaseless, aim less circulation o f packaged codes without metalinguistic privilege, a polyphony o f scrupulously ‘faked’ verbal formulae implacably hostile to the ‘personal voice’.2 What is Jam es Joyce’s style? But this grievous reification o f language, with all its Flaubertian sculpting o f inert verbal materials, is then exacdy what licenses Joyce’s Bakhtinian radicalism , his cam ivalesque, dialogical impacting o f one idiom on another - just as in the Wake a profoundly political undermining o f fixed signification com es about through the movements o f a prom iscuous signifier which, like the commodity form itself, must always level and equalize identities in order to permutate them in startling new ways. T h e mechanism o f exchange or locus o f exchange-value is here the pun or multiple signifier, within whose inner space, as with the commodity itself, the most strikingly disparate m eanings may indifferently combine. It is in this sense that Joyce, to adopt M arx’s phrase, allows history to progress ‘by its bad side’, starting in Brechtian fashion from the bad new things rather than from the good old ones. H is texts turn the economic logic o f capitalist life against its hallowed cultural forms, fastening tenaciously upon a contradiction within late bourgeois society between the realm o f m eaning - the symbolic order in which difference, uniqueness and privilege are the order o f the day - and the sphere o f production, which that symbolic order ironically helps to sustain. Ulysses marks the historic point at which capital begins to penetrate into the very structures o f the symbolic order itself, reorganizing this sacrosanct terrain in accordance with its own degraded, emancipatory logic. It is as though Ulysses and the Wake lift a protean dissolution o f all stable identity from base to superstructure, passing that great circuit o f desire which is capitalist productivity through the domains o f language, meaning and value. And to do this is then to collapse the classical distinction between bourgeois civil society and the public space o f ‘culture’, so that the high-minded harmony o f the latter is no longer so readily available to mystify and legitimate the raw appetite o f the former. C aught like a restless ghost within the later evolution o f capitalism, 376

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liberal humanism is unable either to die or return to life. T h e centred, autonom ous human subject is no clapped-out metaphysical fantasy, to be dispersed at a touch o f deconstroction, but a continuing ideological necessity constantly outstripped and decentred by the operations o f the system itself. T h is hangover from an older liberal epoch o f bourgeois society is still alive and kicking as an ethical, juridical and political category, but embarrassingly out o f gear with certain alternative versions o f subjectivity which arise more direcdy from the late capitalist economy itself. Both forms o f subjecthood are ideologically essential, at different levels o f the social formation; so that a postm odernist critique o f the replete, monadic subject is often enough forcefully radical in one sense and not at all so in another. T o turn the logic o f the commodity against the imperatives o f moral hum anism - to pit the subject as a diffuse network o f passing libidinal attachments against that strenuously self-directing agent which continues to represent the system’s official ideal - is as unacceptable to the regulators o f production as it is welcome to the stage managers o f consumption. A sim ilar ambivalence hangs over the question o f historicity. Is post­ m odernism ’s celebrated historical eclecticism radical or reactionary, a sportive, productive refunctioning o f authoritarian tradition or a frivolous dehistoricizing which freezes history itself to so many banalized recyclable wares? It is surely im possible to answer this question without first assessing something o f the significance o f history for late bourgeois society itself. On the one hand, that society reveres history as authority, continuity, heritage; on the other hand it plainly has no time for it whatsoever. History, as M r Ford remarked, is bunk, a proposition with which a M arxist would not necessarily wish to disagree. Everything depends, once again, on whether one is considering the symbolic or the productive realm: the history which plays a venerable role in the former is continually upturned by the existential Now or crudely progressivist ideologies o f the latter. ‘H istory’ as a concept lacks all unitary, self-identical status in such an order, which is one reason why it is difficult to evaluate in the abstract the political force o f playing around with it. W alter Benjamin was given to distinguishing between history proper and what he termed ‘tradition’, signifying the narrative o f the dispossessed. Only by a ritual o f revolutionary remembrance, lifting the Proustian mémoire involontaire onto the historical plane, could this dangerous, precarious 377

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power o f tradition be prised free o f the ruling-class lineages with which it is bound up and revived as a strategy for unlocking the political present. Revolutionary nostalgia slices sideways into time, shattering its empty continuum and, in a sudden flash o f surrealist or Kabbalistic correspondence, ‘constellating* a moment o f the crisisrocked present with a redeemed fragment o f the tradition o f the oppressed. T h is has, perhaps, a superficial resemblance to post­ m odernist eclecticism, though ‘superficial’ is no doubt the word. The problem is that Benjaminian tradition is not some kind o f separable, autonomous histoiy which flows silently beneath ruling-class time, ghosting it like its shadow; it is simply a set o f recurrent crises or conjunctures within that official temporality, so that the delicacy o f an historical hermeneutic is one o f knowing how to disrupt ruling-class histoiy without spilling the precious resources o f tradition along with it. Benjamin appreciates that there are, after all, different, contradictory histories - that it can never be a question o f some stark binary opposition between the dead weight o f the past and some brave new present, since the past is precisely what we are m ade of. ‘We M arxists’, commented Leon Trotsky, ‘have always lived in tradition’a statement usually greeted with som e bem usement by those political radicals for whom ‘tradition’ spontaneously signifies the H ouse o f Lords or the Changing o f the G uard rather than the Chartists and the Suffragettes, Postmodernism has been eager to interrogate traditional concep­ tions o f truth, and this scepticism o f absolute, monological truth claims has produced some genuinely radical effects. At the sam e time, postm odernism has betrayed a certain chronic tendency to caricature the notions o f truth adhered to by its opponents, setting up straw targets o f transcendentally disinterested knowledge in order to reap the self-righteous delights o f ritually bowling them over. One o f the m ost powerful ideological ploys o f liberal humanist thought has been to secure some supposedly internal relation between truth and disinterestedness, which it is important that radicals should sever. U nless we had interests o f some kind, we would see no point in bothering to find out anything in the first place. B ut it is considerably too convenient to imagine that all dominant social ideologies necessarily operate in accordance with absolute, self-identical concepts o f truth, which a touch o f textuality, deconstruction or self-reflexive irony is then capable o f undoing. Any such simplistic antithesis 378

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overlooks the internal com plexity o f such ideologies, w hich are well capab le from time to tim e o f enlisting irony and self-reflexivity on their sid e. G o o d liberals, as E . M . F o rster knew, m u st be liberal enough to be su sp icio u s o f bein g liberals. L ik e the later Frankfurt school, m uch p ostm odern ist theory typically entertains a vision o f the hegem onic ideologies o f the W est as centrally reliant upon apodictic truth, totalized system , transcendental signification, m etaphysical g ro u n d c d n e ss, the naturalization o f historical contingency and a teleological dynam ic. All o f these factors play an un deniable part in ideological legitim ation; but spelled out in that stark form they delineate an ideological paradigm considerably m ore rigid and ‘ extrem e’ than the internally differentiated, contradictory social d isco u rses w hich now dom inate us. T h e vital distinction betw een liberal cap italist society and its m ore pathological fascistic form s is thus d an gero u sly ob scu red . T h ere is no reason, fo r exam ple, to assu m e that all dom inant social ideologies involve a pervasive, system atic n aturalization o f history, as a whole lineage o f thinkers, from G e o rg L u k â c s to R oland B arth es and P aul d e M an , have apparently p resu p p o sed . ‘T h e y m ake a dram a o f som ething which should be trivial by now ,’ Jü rg e n H ab e rm as rem arks wearily o f A dorno and D errid a, ‘a fallibilist con ception o f truth and know ledge. Even I learnt this from P o p p er!’ ' I f th is is one problem with the postm odern ist or p o st­ structuralist con cern to place the skids un der truth, an other is its uneasy, unw illing com plicity with certain o f the le ss palatable political realities o f late bourgeois society. F o r nobody w ho has read a governm ent com m un iqu e can be in the least surp rised that truth is no longer in fash ion . G ro ss deception, w hitew ash, co ver-u p and lying through o n e’s teeth: these are no longer sp orad ic, regrettable n ecessities o f o u r form o f life but perm anently an d structurally essen tial to it. In such conditions, the true facts - concealed, su p p re ssed , d isto rted - can be in them selves politically explosive; and those who have developed the nervous tic o f p lacin g such vulgar term s as ‘tru th ’ and ‘ fact’ in fastidiously distan cing scare quotes sh ould be carefu l to avoid a certain collusion between th eir own hightoned th eoretical gestu res and the m ost banal, routin e political strategics o f the capitalist pow er-structure. T h e begin ning o f the good life is to try as far as p ossible to see the situation a s it really is. It is unw ise to assu m e that am biguity, indeterm inacy, undecidability are 379

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alw ays subversive strikes against an arrogantly m onological certitude; on the contrary, they are the stock-in-trade o f m any a juridical enquiry an d official investigation. T h e patrician disd ain which the literary m ind has alw ays evinced for such prosaic phen om en a as the facts is not notably m ore persuasive once it is elaborated into a soph isticated textual theory'. O n ce again, then, the politics o f the interrogation o f truth are every bit as am bivalent as the status o f truth itse lf within ou r societies. I f truth reigns suprem e within the cultural and sym bolic order, it is dispen sable enough in the m arket place and political forum . P ostm odern ism has been equally concern ed to discredit the concept o f totality', and h as valuably challenged the various idealist and essen tialist version s o f this notion which, in M arxism and elsew here, have long been on offer. It is always difficult, however, to know quite how far this dism antling o f totalization should be taken. It is p ossible to argue, for exam ple, that a philosopher like M ichel F o ucault rem ain s captive to a rigorously totalizing im pulse, whatever his celebration o f heterogeneity and plurality'. F o u cau lt would appear to believe that there exist total system s known as ‘p riso n s’, a s though som e unitary entity corresponded to the appellation ‘ D artm oor’ . But what is ‘ D artm o o r’ other than a decentred assem b lage o f this or that cell, w arder, disciplinary technique, hypoderm ic syringe? Why this rem orseless urge to hom ogenize these d iffuse, particular realities in a singular concept? An effort to elude any such totalizing m etaphysics o f the ‘prison’ would carry, o f course, distinctive political implications. T h ere co u ld , for exam ple, be no orienting o n eself tactically to the socalled ‘total institution’ - no debating with the governor about the ‘prison re g im e ’, no contrasting o f one type o f ‘p rison ’ with another, no perm issib le statem ent which designated the p rison ers as a collective body. S u ch totalizing w ould be no m ore than an inverted reflection o f the relen tless hom ogenizings o f the ruling order, if it were p ossible to speak o f a “ruling o rd er’, which it is not. A genuine m icropolitics o f the prison w ould be in every sen se cellular. It is alw ays p ossible, in other w ords, to stum ble across a m ore fervent nom inalist than oneself. F o r all those who feel that the hum an body is no m ore than a disarticulated ensem ble o f th is or that organ, there is alw ays som eon e else who feels just the sam e way about the concept o f organ. It is as though any thought can be m ade to appear a s an illicit totalization from the standpoint o f som e other, and so on 380

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in a potentially infinite regress. Whatever the argument over ‘totality’ is about, it surely cannot be about this. T h e supposed discrediting o f this idea is, historically speaking, deeply ironic. F o r it springs from ju st that recent political period about which it would be highly plausible to contend that the system which radicals oppose has never, for a long time, shown itself quite as total - where the capillary connections between economic crisis, national liberation struggle, the resurgence o f proto-fascist ideologies, the tightening hold o f the state, have never been quite so palpable. It is at just this historical moment, when it is clear that what we confront is indeed in some sen se a ‘total system’, and is som etim es recognized as such by its own rulers, that elements o f the political left begin to speak o f plurality, multiplicity, schizoid circuits, m icrostrategies and the rest. T h ere are, perhaps, two major reasons for this theoretical move, one rather more creditable than the other. T h e more creditable reason is that many o f the concepts o f totality traditionally to hand are indeed objectionably homogenizing and essentialistic, superiorly excluding a range o f crucial political struggles which they have decided, for one reason or another, can hardly be regarded as ‘central*. T h e undermining o f this version o f totality is thus an urgent political task. T h e less creditable reason for the shift is that, some twenty years ago, the political left discovered to its dismay that the system was currently too powerful, too total, to be broken. One consequence o f this gloomy revelation is what is now known as postM arxism - a name which one takes to designate those who have come right through M arxism and out somewhere the other side, rather than those m iddle-class liberals who, having rem ained exactly where they always were, now suddenly find them selves rather in fashion. PostM arxism and postm odernism are by no m eans responses to a system which has eased up, disarticulated, pluralized its operations, but to precisely the opposite: to a power-structure which, being in a sense m ore ‘total’ than ever, is capable for the moment o f disarming and dem oralizing many o f its antagonists. In such a situation, it is som etim es comforting and convenient to im agine that there is not after all, as Foucault might have said, anything ‘total’ to be broken. It is a s though, having temporarily mislaid the breadknife, one declares the lo af to be already sliced. T h e term ‘p ost’, if it has any meaning at all, m eans business as usual, only more so. 381

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Aesthetics, as we have seen, arises in p an as a response to a new situation in early bourgeois society, in which values now appear to be alarmingly, mysteriously underivable. O nce the actualities o f social life suffer reification, they would no longer seem to offer an adequate starting-point for discourses o f value, which accordingly float loose into their own idealist space. Value m ust now either be self­ grounding, or founded in intuition; and the aesthetic, as we have seen, serves as a model for both o f these strategies. Sprung from som e affective or metaphysical space, values can no longer be subm itted to rational enquiry and argumentation; it is difficult now, for example, to say o f my desires that they are ‘unreasonable’, in the sense, perhaps, o f illicitly im peding the just desires o f others. It is this aestheticization o f value that has been inherited by the contemporary currents o f postmodernism and post-structuralism. T h e result o f this is a new kind o f transcendentalism, in which desires, beliefs and interests now occupy just those a priori locations which were traditionally reserved for W orld Spirit or the absolute ego. A characteristic formulation o f the case can be found in this comment by Tony Bennett: ‘it seems to me that socialism can extricate itself from the mire o f an epistemological and ethical relativism only by m eans o f a political desire which functions as cause and justification o f itself (although it is, o f course, produced by and within the complex play o f social forces and relationships)*,4 Bennett’s selfcausing, self-validating political desire is not far removed from Kantian practical reason, or indeed from Spinozan Nature. T h is notion o f a self-generative, self-legitim ating force is in essence aesthetic and theological. Such a theory takes as its absolute baseline certain irreducible, rationally uncontestable imperatives, and then allows the cognitive a purely instrumental space o f manoeuvre within this aprioristic field. T o this extent, for all its protests against Enlightenment, it shares the problematic o f a H obbes or H um e, for whom reason is the slave o f passion. Interests and desires operate in effect if not in admission as quasi-transcendental anteriorities; there can be no asking from whence they derive, or under what circum stances one would be prepared to lay them down, for such values, whatever their origin in social interaction, are as radically given as the human body. D esire, belief and commitment, as with the Sophists* reduction o f them to ‘nature*, are simply withdrawn from the process o f rational justification, as that which one can never get 382

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behind. T h is ease subscribes implicitly to a reified, instrumentalized version o f rationality, as Verstand rather than Vernunft, and then understandably wishes to disengage value from this inherently degraded medium. On the one hand there is a realm o f lifeless, discrete facts, quite bereft o f structure; on the other hand there are the arbitrary, competing value-perspectives o f a plethora o f subjects, each perspective absolutely self-sealed and self-grounded. It is not difficult to see how well this (anti-)epistemology tallies with the conditions o f bourgeois society, even in its radical varieties. There is either a realm o f free-floating values, a market place within which the ethical consum er makes his or her free choice, or our culture has always already in some sense chosen for us. T h e former position belongs with the old-fashioned decisionism o f an R .M . H are; the latter case, as in the varieties o f American neo-pragmatism, complacently consecrates the given culture, protecting it under the guise o f a ‘radical* or faintly scandalous anti-foundationalism from fundamental critique. T h e reactionary nature o f this position is made explicit in the genial, clubbish, laid-back, end-of-ideologies ideology o f a Richard Rorty, whose surnam e, so the Oxford English Dictionary inform s us, means ‘fond o f amusement and excitement’. It is as plain, though less candidly acknowledged, in the work o f a Stanley Fish, with his phallocentric horror o f ambiguity and indeterminacy. We are offered the alternatives, as with Hayden White, o f old-style decision­ ism or existentialism,5 or, as with Fish, o f a monistic cultural determinism as devoted to the defence o f the Free World as the Pershing missile. T h e weakness o f this case is its failure to worry political radicals unduly. If neo-pragm atists, for their own peculiar purposes, wish to characterize such actions as the socialization o f industry and the dismantling o f N A T O as merely ‘carrying on the conversation*, behaving in a rule-bound fashion or being ineluctably constrained by a belief-system, then there is no reason why radicals should protest too vigorously against these descriptions as long as they are allowed to do what they wish to do. As long as such beliefs, in good pragmatist fashion, make a difference to the world, these theoretical descriptions o f them need not prove particularly alarming. T h e phenomenon o f post-M arxism throws some interesting light on the issues at stake here. T h e originality o f M arx and Engels’s political thought, as M arx him self once comm ented, lay not in the discovery o f the existence o f social classes, which had long been 383

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know n, but in the claim that an internal relation could be discerned betw een the struggle betw een such classes and the stage o f developm ent o f a m ode o f production. T h e w orld o f hum an beliefs and values, and the nature o f m aterial activity, w ere thus bound closely togeth er. T h e notorious econom ism o f the S e c o n d Intern a­ tional travesties this doctrine by reducin g class conflict to a function o f eco n o m ic evolution; and hum anistic M arxism then overreacts to this reduction ism , staking all on co n scio u sn ess and the class subject. It is, ironically, the resolutely anti-hum anist theory o f the A lthusserian sch oo l w hich con sum m ates this disseverin g o f class struggle and m ode o f production, in its effective aban don m en t o f the classical M arxist doctrin e o f contradiction betw een the forces and relations o f production. C la ss struggle becom es a wholly conjun ctural m atter, a question o f strategic calculation; and this position reflects the covert influence o f M ao ism , with its highly voluntaristic em p h asis upon ‘politics’ a s ag ain st ‘eco n o m ics’.6 It then proves a sm all step from this position to the post-A lth usserian jettisoning o f the w hole con cep t o f ‘m ode o f p ro d u ctio n ’, leaving class struggle h an gin g in the air; and for som e erstw hile post-A lth usserian s at least, it is then only another step to the effective rejection o f the centrality o f class conflict, and thus o f M arxism itself. L et us turn now to two post-structuralist texts w hich centre upon the p ro b lem o f ethics. T h e first is M ichel F o u c a u lt’s The Use o f Pleasure, volum e two o f his History o f Sexuality ; the seco n d is Je a n F ran çois L y o tard ’s philosophical dialogue with Je a n - L o u p T h éb au d , Ju st Gaming. T h e re is a cu rio u s feature about the w riting o f M ichel F o u cau lt th at several com m entators have noted, and which is at one level a q u estio n o f style. F o u cau lt habitually w rites o f op p ressive, even horren dous practices and institutions with a carefully calculated clinical neutrality, which h as even attracted the epithet ‘positivist’ from Jü rg e n H ab e rm as.7 F o u cau lt’s style is scrup ulously nonjudgem ental, his com m entaries purged o f the least hint o f normativity. T h is stylistic m ode is not far at tim es from a certain perverse eroticism , as the m ost sen sation al m aterials - the torture o f a hum an body, for exam ple - are m ediated through a d istan ced, d ispassion ate tone, a m e asu red , m andarin Fren ch serenely un ruffled by its own sh ocking con ten ts. P ressed to an extrem e, such a conflation o f clinicism an d sen sation alism is the stu ff o f pornography, w hich is not to su g g e st th at F o u cau lt’s own w riting is pornographic. T h e re may 384

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well be in this style an element o f mischievous parody, a trumping o f the scholars on their own terrain, a cool adaptation o f their own bloodless discourse to entirely opposite political ends; but it is surely also the stylistic index o f a genuine contradiction at the heart o f poststructuralist thought- W e know from Foucault’s political writings that his response to the oppressive regim es he records so impassively is one o f a radical, implacable refusal; but the question is one o f the position from which such a refusal is to be launched. Foucault’s Nietzscheanism forbids him any universal or transcendental stand­ point o f ethico-political judgem ent on the history he examines; yet as a radical political activist he is clearly unable to abandon judgem ent altogether. H is style, which refrains from explicit judgem ent but in a way so m arked that this very silence itself becom es eloquent, that the very lack o f moral comment becom es a comm ent all o f its own, is then an attempt to negotiate this dilemma. Any post-structuralist theory which desires to be in som e sense political is bound to find itself caught on the hop between the normativity which such politics entail, and its own full-blooded cultural relativism. One can trace a similar tension in som e contemporary feminist writing, which occasionally seem s to argue with the one breath that truth does not exist, and with the next that men oppress women. T h is conflict between cultural relativism and the dem ands o f normative moral judgem ent com es to a head over the question o f oppressive patriarchal practices such as foot-binding or clitoridectomy, which have the sanction o f age-old cultural traditions. T h e necessary and proper universalism o f the judgem ent that the oppression o f women in any form is always morally wrong, and that no appeal to cultural tradition can constitute a defence o f such conduct, runs into headlong conflict with a cultural relativism which is reluctant to appear ‘ethnocentric’ in its outlook. W e should seek to understand the headhunters, not to change them. Foucault has, in fact, a kind o f solution to this problem. It is not that any particular historical regime is better or worse than any other though as we shall see he sometimes implies such a distinction. What is objectionable is regime as such. What is insupportable is the whole notion that human life should be norm alized, regulated, institutional­ ized. Such a situation is offensive to Foucault’s extreme nominalism, which would regard the very categorizing involved in the act o f nam ing as a violation o f unique specificity. ‘For Foucault’ , as Peter 385

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D ew s comments, ‘the mere fact o f becom ing an object o f knowledge represents a kind o f enslavement.’8 B ut this claim needs instandy to be qualified. For Foucault is not o f course as naive as to believe for a moment that human life could ever be anything other than institutional life, or proceed by anything other than particular disciplines and techniques. I f he is in one sense a libertarian, he is not at all in another: in common with many other post-structuralists, he is deeply sceptical o f the utopian dream that heterogeneity could ever be completely released from the categories and institutions, the forms o f discursive and non-discursive dom est­ ication, which alone lend it social embodiment. We can never escape law, regimentation, the prison house o f the metaphysical; but this does not stop one fantasizing for a moment (a moment usually reserved for one’s more ‘poetic’ texts) o f som e apocalyptic moment in which all this might come to end, finding proleptic traces o f such a revolution in avant-garde literary works. It is hard to criticize particular institutions without dreaming for a giddy moment o f what it might be like to be emancipated from institutionality altogether. Foucault is in one sense a sort o f anarchist; but he does not believe in that anarchism for a moment, for it could never possibly come about, and it would be the height o f romantic libertarian folly to imagine that it could. T h is ambivalence then allows him to combine, in a manner typical o f much post-structuralism, a kind o f secret apocalyptic ultra­ leftism with a dry-eyed, pragmatic political reformism. It protects him at once from the reactionary and the romantic - the latter being a vice to which French intellectuals, one might claim, are peculiarly allergic, preferring on the whole to be thought wicked rather than gullible. A form o f absolute moral position is preserved - the secret refusal of regim e as such - which then allows Foucault to dissociate him self in a grandly panoramic gesture from every social formation to date; but since what is objectionable about these formations is essentially the fact that they are formations, rather than the particular values they embody, a kind o f knowing, sophisticated relativism may accordingly be maintained, and one is absolved from the need to make explicit the values in whose name one’s critique is deployed. ‘T o imagine another system ’, Foucault comments, ‘is to extend our participation in the present system .* It is system itself, in a purely formalistic politics, which is the enemy; but this enemy is quite ineluctable, and like the poor will always be with us. Such a viewpoint dangerously elides the 386

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distinctions between, say, fascistic and liberal capitalist forms o f society; the latter, for Foucault as much as for the late Frankfurt school, would som etim es seem as terroristic as the former. (A similar elision is effected by Foucault’s mentor Althusser, whose concept o f ‘ideological state apparatuses’ refuses as purely legalistic the vital difference between state-controlled and non-state ideological institutions.) Foucault’s work, then, represents a kind o f negative or inverted ultra-leftism , in which a resolute revolutionary negation is at once clung to and disowned. T h e dream o f liberty m ust be cherished, but this im pulse has fallen, historically speaking, on hard times, and caustically refuses the possibility o f its own realization. T o this extent Foucault, along with Jacq u es D errida, is exemplary o f an ideology now dominant am ong a certain sector o f the W estern radical intelligentsia: libertarian pessim ism . T h e oxymoron is instructive: libertarian, because something o f the old expression/repression m odel lingers on in the dream o f an entirely free-floating signifier, an infinite textual productivity, an existence blessedly free from the shackles o f truth, meaning and sociality. Pessim istic, because whatever blocks such creativity - law, meaning, power, closure - is acknowledged to be built into it, in a sceptical recognition o f the imbrication o f authority and desire, m adness and metaphysics, which springs from a paradigm quite other than the expression/repression model. Both models are at work in post-structuralist thought, generating som e notable internal tensions. Charles Taylor has pointed out that though Foucault wishes to discredit the very notion o f a liberation from power, his own concept o f power does not in fact m ake sense without the idea o f such liberation.10 O ne might trace this aporia within post-structuralist writing in a rather different way, in a kind o f running conflict between its ‘epistemology* and its ‘ethics’ - both, o f course, deeply suspect terms for the practitioners o f the discourse themselves. T h e (anti-) epistem ology o f post-structuralism focuses recurrently on im passe, failure, error, missing the mark, not quite-ness, to the point where an insistence that something in a text does not quite come off, has always already failed, is even now not quite failing to deviate from what it never exactly already was, has hardened into the sheerest conventional gesture. Post-structuralism shares an underdog suspicion o f the success ethic, which lends it a radical flavour. But this assault on an 387

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arrogant metaphysical self-identity is made, often enough, in the name o f a freeing o f forces which seem in Nietzschean fashion to acknowledge no such humble hesitancy, powers which insist on their own sweet way, which dance without stum bling and laugh without a catch in the breath. Sceptical and libertarian moments are once more curiously conjoined, in an amphibious sensibility' which owes much to a mixing o f soixante-huit ecstasy with that historical moment’s more disenchanted aftermath. Part o f Foucault’s objection to the shackling o f madness, in his early Madness and Civilisation, is an aesthetic one: the disciplines which regulate m adness rob it o f its dram a and sublimity.11 H is later preoccupation with power also places him firmly in the aestheticizing tradition; for power in Foucault’s work has much in common with the classical aesthetic artefact, self-grounding, self-generative and self­ delighting, without origin or end, an elusive blending o f governance and pleasure which is thus a kind o f subject all in itself, however subjecdess it may otherwise be. Indeed Foucault can even be entranced by the organicism o f this splendid aesthetic construct, as when he comments on power as ‘an extremely complex system o f relations, which leads one finally to wonder how, given that no one person can have conceived it in its entirety, it can be so subtle in its distribution, its mechanisms, reciprocal controls and adjustments’.12 T h e stance is that o f a Victorian agnostic contemplating some disturbing evidence o f design in the universe. How can such a marvellously unified artefact have arisen without an artificer? Such organicism is not o f course typical o f post-structuralism, which tends to retrieve the ludic, pleasurable aspects o f the aesthetic while rejecting its organicist motifs for plurality, dispersal and indeterminacy. But an aesthetic gratification in the motions o f power is in fact one o f the more disturbing facets o f Foucault’s work. It is coupled with the insinuation one can sometimes detect in his writing, when he is considering the brutal violence o f the anciens régimes, that such violence is in som e way morally preferable to the pacified, tabulated, transparent subject o f the humanist epoch. T h e horror o f the old asylums, writes Ian Hacking, Svas not worse than the solemn destruction o f the mad by committees o f experts with their constantly changing manuals o f nostrums’.13 The irresponsibility o f such a view symptomatic, perhaps, o f the romantic primitivism o f the self388

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castigating intellectual - is at one with Foucault’s occasional dangerous inclination towards absolutist coercion as against Enlight­ enment hegemony. Foucault evinces a well-nigh pathological aversion to the whole category o f the subject, one considerably more negative than that manifested by Nietzsche himself. In his drastically undialectical attitude to Enlightenment, he eradicates at a stroke alm ost all o f its vital civilizing achievements, in which he can see nothing but insidious techniques o f subjection. H is view o f selfidentity is monotonously self-identical. It is therefore ironic that, late in h is life, he began to discover that the Enlightenment was not so unreservedly monstrous after all, denying that he was a counterEnlightenment thinker in the sense o f one who denied that we did not still in large part depend upon it.14 It is not, naturally, that Foucault ever celebrates the horrors o f feudalist absolutism; but it is worth noting that his latent preference for a power which is evident rather than covert forms the basis o f his later discussions o f this topic. T h e early Foucault o f Madness and Civilisation, as he him self was later to acknowledge, still operates to som e degree with the ‘repression* thesis, dream ing o f a wild, mute, essentially healthy m adness which given a chance might inrupt through oppressive practices and speak in its own tongue. T h e later Foucault’s insistence on the productivity o f power, and on the falsity o f the repression thesis, then constitutes an overreaction to his own earlier romanticism. If power was initially portrayed in too negative a style, it is now grasped as rather too positive. T h e truth that power does indeed repress as well as enable, that it is indeed at times centralized and ‘intentional’ as well as diffused and subjectless, that there are conspiracies as well as self-regulative strategies, is merely erased, in a monistic vision ironically typical o f this devotee o f plurality and heterogeneity. Absolutist power is opposed for its despotic centralism, but sometim es surreptitiously promoted in its relative openness, physicality and non-subjectivizing over the hege­ monic epoch o f M an, when, as Foucault writes, ‘the laws o f the state and the laws o f the heart are at last identical’.15 Power is at its best, then, when it is neither centralizing nor hegemonic, and it is to this view o f an ‘authentic’ power that Foucault will finally come through. T h is, indeed, is classically Nietzschean in its tripartite scenario: from brute coercion, to insidious hegemony, to a power rescued at once 389

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from despotism and inferiority and applauded as self-causing and self-sustaining. Like the aesthetic artefact, power is non-instrumental, non-teleological, autonomous and self-referential. T h is aesthetics o f power, however, is to some extent in conflict with Foucault’s radical politics. F o r it is as i f the concept o f power in the Foucault o f such works as Discipline and Punish is being made to serve simultaneously two somewhat incompatible purposes. In so far as power rem ains politically oppressive, it must call forth refusal and resistance; in so far as it is aestheticized, it acts as the medium o f a pleasurable expansion and productivity o f capacities. T h e claim that power is ‘productive’ is ambiguous in this respect: this productivity is in one sense oppressive, generating ever more refined techniques o f subjection and surveillance, but there is also an unavoidable suggestion that it is productive in a rather more positive or creative sense too, a triumphant Nietzschean growth, unfolding and prolifera­ tion. T h e thesis that power is all-pervasive is thus more pessim istic from the political standpoint than it is from the aesthetic one. Foucault’s whole attitude to power thus carries with it a profound ambivalence, which reflects his attempt to combine Nietzsche with a radical or even revolutionary politics. And this ambivalence cannot simply be resolved by pitting one o f these modalities o f power against the other, the aesthetic or creative against the oppressively political, for this would simply land us back in a version o f the expression/ repression doctrine. Power which politically oppresses is also ‘aesthetic’ in its very essence, wholly wrapped up in its own self­ enjoyment and self-expansiveness. T h is aestheticized model o f power allows Foucault to distance him self at once from coercion and hegemony, as indeed is the case with Nietzsche himself. One mode o f the aesthetic - the selfgenerative pleasures o f power - is opposed to another: the hegemonic introjection o f the law. T h is manoeuvre permits Foucault to oppose oppressiveness without losing grip on power’s positivity, and without invoking a subject in whose name this opposition is executed. It is possible, in short, to have the best o f both worlds: a power which has the positivity o f the ancien régime, having not been passed through the hypocrises o f hegemony, and yet which - as in the era o f hegemony lacks that regim e’s more offensive cruelty. T h e arbitrariness o f absolutist power is preserved, but now displaced from the whimsical 390

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diktats o f the monarch to the gratuitous fluctuations o f a nonsubjective field o f force. In the late writings o f Foucault, the theme o f aestheticization explicitly em erges. T o live well is to transfigure oneself into a work o f art by an intensive process o f self-discipline. ‘M odem man, for Baudelaire’, Foucault writes, ‘is not the man who goes oflf to discover him self, his secrets and his hidden truth: he is the man who tries to invent himself. T h is modernity does not “liberate man in his own being” ; it com pels him to face the task o f producing himself.’ 16 T h is aesthetic working upon oneself is a sort o f self-hegemony; but it differs from humanistic hegemony, as in N ietzsche, in that it allows one to give the law to oneself, rather than come meekly under the sway o f a heteronomous decree. T his, indeed, is the project o f The Use o f Pleasure, in which Foucault is finally able to fill one o f the gaping voids in his work - the question o f ethics - with an aesthetic alternative to humanist morality. In antiquity, one can supposedly uncover a morality which is more oriented to ‘practices o f the se lf’, in the sense o f an aesthetic production o f the se lf that ‘answers to criteria o f brilliance, beauty, nobility, or perfection’,17 than to universal codes o f conduct in the Judaeo-C hristian manner. T h e ethical ideal is one o f an ascetic, dispassionate masteiy over one’s pow ers, ‘a mode o f being which could be defined by the full enjoyment o f oneself, or the perfect supremacy o f oneself over oneself’ (p. 31). T h is position thus combines the best o f coercion - to produce on eself involves a taxing, punitive discipline - with the best o f hegemony: the subject has the autonomy o f the hegemonic subject, but now in a more radically authentic manner. Aesthetic self­ production is a question o f explicit power, not o f that treacherous dissem bling o f power which is hegemony; but since this power is directed upon oneself it cannot be oppressive, and so is distanced from the epoch o f coercion too. With many judicious qualifications, Foucault equates Christianity with the dominance o f a fixed universal code, and the ancient world with a more conjuncturally variable kind o f conduct. T h e abstract code remains, but there is a looser, more flexible relation between it and the particular practices it licenses, which cannot be seen as mere obedient instantiations o f this general decree. T h ere is a degree o f free play between norm and practice, or between what Althusser 391

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w ould term ‘th eoretical’ and ‘practical’ ideologies. T h e tyranny o f the universal law is thereby tem pered: the ancient G re e k s, F oucault argu es, did not seek to introduce a code o f co n d u ct bindin g upon everyone, an d thus w ere absolved from the constrain ts o f hum anist hegem ony: F o r them , reflection on sexual behaviour a s a m oral d om ain w as not a m ean s o f internalising, justifying, or form alisin g general interdictions im posed on everyone; rath er, it w as a m ean s o f developing - from the sm allest m inority o f the population, m ade up o f free, adult m ales an aesth etics o f existence, the purposeful art o f a freedom p erceived as a pow er gam e. (pp. 2 5 2 - 3 ). F o u cau lt can thus redefin e the relations betw een law and pleasure, universal an d particular: there is here no naive liberationist vision o f a sim ple relinquish in g o f the law, but the individual particular is now rather m ore oblique to it. T h e mighty' aesthetic organ ism o f hum anist hegem ony, in which all the com ponent parts are ru led and inform ed by a sin g u lar principle, gives ground to a m ultitude o f little individual artefacts, each o f them relatively autonom ous and self-determ in in g, w here w hat m atters is style and techne, the relationship which an individual co n d u cts with h im self in a form irreducible to a general universal m odel. T h e idea o f hegem ony, then, is retained, but turned into an internal relation ship betw een parts o f the self. T h e individual m ust construct a relation with the s e lf that is one o f ‘d om in ation -su bm issio n *, ‘com m and—ob ed ien ce’, ‘m astery-docility’ (p. 70). F o u cau lt is thus able to com b in e the concept o f individual autonom y, which stan ds relatively free o f the law, with the p leasu res o f sad o-m asoch istic pow er such a law involves. W hat is gratifying and productive about pow er, its disciplin e and dom inativeness, is salvaged from political op p ressiv en ess and installed within the self. In this way one can enjoy the gain s o f hegem ony without denying the p le asu res o f pow er. O ne m ight q u estion , however, how far this m odel really allow s Foucault to escape from the lures o f traditional hegemony. F o r the m oral hegemony o f the epoch o f M an , as N ietzsche recognized, surely entails a kind o f practice up on the self, which N ietzsche in fact m uch adm ired. Su ch hegem ony d o e s not com e about spontaneously, w ithout a d egree o f 392

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self-labour; and it is only by implicitly caricaturing it as a passive, docile receptivity’ to law that Foucault can effectively counterpose it to the ancient ethic he is approving. T h e two conditions indeed differ, since in the case o f ancient society there is, we are told, no single monolithic law to be introjected; but the activity involved in that kind o f hegemony, and in the self-hegem ony o f the ancient G reeks, are not perhaps as antithetical as Foucault would seem to consider. Indeed he actually quotes Plato’s comments on the homology between this style o f self-governance, which Foucault him self clearly endorses, and the imperative o f maintaining the polis, which he clearly does not endorse. ‘T h e ethics o f pleasure’, Foucault writes, ‘is o f the sam e order o f reality as the political structure’; ‘i f the individual is like the city’, comm ents Plato, ‘the sam e structure must prevail in him’ (p. 71). Foucault goes on to emphasize that these two forms o f practice - governing oneself and governing others - will gradually separate out: ‘T h e time would come when the art o f the se lf would assum e its own shape, distinct from the ethical conduct that was its objective’ (p. 77). But it nevertheless rem ains an embarrassm ent that the aestheticization o f the se lf which he so strongly recom m ends should take its origin from the need to sustain the political authority o f a slave-based society. A s with Nietzsche, Foucault’s vigorously self-m astering individual rem ains wholly monadic. Society is just an assem blage o f autonomous self-disciplining agents, with no sense that their self-realization might flourish within bonds o f mutuality. T h e ethic in question is also troublingly formalistic. What matters is one’s control over and prudent distribution o f one’s powers and pleasures; it is in this ascetic self-restraint that true freedom lies, as the freedom o f the artefact is inseparable from its self-im posed law. ‘ It was not a question’, Foucault claims, ‘o f what was permitted or forbidden among the desires that one felt or the acts that one committed, but o f prudence, reflection, and calculation in the way one distributed and controlled his acts’ (p. 54). Foucault has now - at last! —introduced the question o f critical self-reflection into desire and power, a position perhaps not wholly at one with his Nietzscheanism; but he does so only to produce a formalistic account o f morality. T h e ancients, he writes, did not operate on the assum ption that sexual acts were bad in themselves; what matters is not the mode o f conduct one prefers but the ‘intensity’ o f that practice, and so an aesthetic rather than ethical

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criterion. But it is surely not true that som e sexual acts are not inherently vicious. Rape, or child abuse, are signal examples. Is rape morally vicious only because it signifies a certain imprudence or immoderacy on the part o f the rapist? Is there nothing to be said about the victim? T h is is a subject-centred morality with a vengeance: ‘For the wife [of G reek antiquity]* Foucault writes without the faintest sardonic flicker, ‘having sexual relations only with her husband was a consequence o f the fact that she was under his control. For the husband, having sexual relations only with his wife was the most elegant way o f exercising his control* (p. 151). Chastity is a political necessity for women and an aesthetic flourish for men. T h ere is no reason whatsoever to imagine that Foucault actually approves o f this dire condition; but it is one odious corollary o f the ethic he most certainly does endorse. It is also true that Foucault, at least at one point in his life, opposed the criminalization o f rape. Part o f the problem o f his approach consists in taking sexuality as somehow paradigmatic o f morality in general - a stance which ironically reduplicates the case o f the moral conservative, for whom sex would seem to exhaust and epitomize all moral issues. How would Foucault’s case work if it were transferred to, say, the act o f slander? Is slander acceptable as long as I exercise my power to perform it moderately, judiciously, slandering perhaps three persons but not thirty? Am I morally admirable if I retain a certain controlled deployment o f my slanderous powers, letting them out and reining them in in an elegant display o f internal symmetry? D oes it all come down to a question o f how, in postm odernist vein, one ‘stylizes’ one’s conduct? What would a stylish rape look like, precisely? Foucault’s G reeks believe that one should temper and refine one’s practices not because they are inherently good or bad, but because self-indulgence leads to a depletion o f one’s vital powers - a familiar male fantasy if ever there was one. T h e more one aesthetically restrains oneself, the richer the powers which accrue to one - which is to say that power here would seem in romantic vein an unquestioned good, a wholly undifferentiated categoiy. T h e positivity o f power can thus be maintained, but converted into the basis o f a discriminatory ethics by virtue o f adding to it the techniques o f prudence and temperance. And the ethical theory which is the upshot o f this - that ‘the physical regim en ought to accord with the principle o f a general aesthetics o f existence in which the equilibrium o f the body was one o f the 394

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conditions o f the p roper hierarchy o f the so u l’ (p . 104) - has long been fam iliar on the playing fields o f Eton. W ith The Use o f Pleasure, F oucault co m p letes his long trek from the hym ning o f m ad n ess to the public school virtues. T h e ethical tech niques with which F o ucault is con cern ed in this book are o n e s o f subjectivization; hut how far the lo n g-d esp ised subject actually m akes its belated appearance in these p a g e s is a m oot point. It is clear that F o u cau lt’s repressive hostility to subjectivity, w hich he can usually see only as self-in carceration, depriv es him o f all b asis for an eth ics or a politics, leaving his rebellion a u se le ss passion ; and this volum e is am on g other things an attem pt to plug that disablin g gap. B u t he still cannot quite bring h im self to ad d ress the question o f the subject as such. W hat we have here, rath er than the su b ject and its d esire s, is the body and its p leasu res - a half-way, crab-w ise, aesth eticizin g move tow ards the subject w hich leaves love a s technique an d conduct rather than as ten dern ess an d affection, as praxis rather th an inferiority. It is sym ptom atic in this resp ect that the practice clo se st to sexuality in the book is that o f eating. A m assive rep ression , in other w ords, would still seem operative, a s the body stan d s in for the su b ject and the aesthetic for the ethical. In one sen se, the su d d e n appearance o f the autonom ous individual in this work, after an intellectual career devoted to system atically scourging it, co m es as so m eth in g o f a surprise; but this individual is a m atter, very scrupulously, o f su rface, art, technique, sen sation . W e are still not perm itted to enter the tabooed realm s o f affection, em otional intim acy and co m passion , which are not particularly notable am ong the public sch oo l virtues. I f F o u cau lt’s an em p t to aesthcticize social life in The Use o f Pleasure is a radically un satisfactory affair, m uch the sam e can be said o fJe a n F ran ço is L y o tard ’s project in Ju st Gaming. L yo tard ’s problem , like F o u cau lt’s, is that he w ishes to m aintain a post-structuralist d iscou rse w hich is som ehow politically engaged. T h is is not a problem w hich has ever apparently cau sed m uch lo ss o f sleep to Ja c q u e s D errid a, w hose political profile has always been rem arkably low and indeterm inate. But Lyotard is a form er socialist militant and veteran o f c la ss struggle, an erstw hile leadin g ideologue o f Socialisme ou Barbarie, w ho is properly reluctant to ditch notions o f social justice altogeth er b u t m ust discover, with the su p p osed collapse o f the old 395

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meta-narratives, a fresh way o f grounding them. It is this which Just Gaming sets out to accomplish; and its ‘grounding* o f the concept o f justice consists essentially in an unholy mélange o f Kant and Sophistic conventionalism. In The Postmodern Condition, a work which despite its nervousness o f totalities is immodesdy sub-titled *A Report on Know lege’, Lyotard urges us to abandon the grands récits o f the Enlightenment and model our knowledge instead on the selflegitimating narratives o f the Cashinahua Indians o f the upper Amazon, whose stories, so we are told, apparendy certify their own truth in the pragmatics o f their transmission. It is difficult, therefore, to see how there can be for Lyotard any real distinction between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness: the one who has the sm oothest tongue or the raciest story* has the power. It is also hard to see how this move would not, for example, authorize the narratives of N azism , provided they are grippingly enough recounted. Nazism , for Lyotard as for some other postmodern thinkers, is one lethal destination o f the Enlightenment’s grands récits, the tragic consumm a­ tion o f a terroristic Reason and totality. He does not understand it as the upshot o f a barbarous anti-Enlightenment irrationalism which, like certain aspects o f postmodernism, junked history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and staked all on the charisma o f those who told the stories. There is no comment in The Postmodern Condition on the contemporary women’s movement, which in its sim ultaneous belief in political emancipation, and in the need to be liberated from a dominative male rationality, somewhat complicates any simple response to the Enlightenment. N or is there any consideration o f the national liberation movements which, since the American defeat in Vietnam, have inflicted on global imperialism a series o f staggering rebuffs, and which often enough operate by the ‘m etalanguages’ o f freedom, justice and truth. T h ese movements have not, apparendy, heard o f postmodernism , or o f the epistemological illusions o f meta-narrative. There is an interesting parallel in The Postmodern Condition between a ‘good’ pragmatism and a ‘bad’ one: just as those succeed best who tell the finest stories, so (as Lyotard him self remarks) he who has the fattest research grant is most likely to be right. T h e Confederation o f British Industry, did they but know it, are postmodernists to a man. Lyotard begins his discussion o f justice in Ju st Gaming, unpropi­ tiously enough, with a straightforward espousal o f intuitionism. We 396

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m ust judge ‘without criteria . . . It is decided, and that is all that can be s a id . . . I mean that, in each instance, I have a feeling, that is a ll. . . B ut i f l am asked by what criteria do I judge, I will have no answer to give.’ 18 Later in the volume, Lyotard will remark that an aesthetic politics cannot be adequate, no doubt with a backward glance at the am oral philosophy o f libidinal ‘intensities* o f his own earlier Economie Libidinale, but all he has done here is to substitute one sense o f the aesthetic - intuition - for another. H e is compelled into this dogmatic intuitionism because he believes it impermissible to derive the prescriptive from the descriptive, to base a politics on an analytical theory o f society. Such an approach would suggest just the possibility o f a ‘meta-view’ o f society which he is out to deny. T h is is also the position o f the later Foucault, who writes that it’s not at all necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific knowledge . . . For centuries we have been convinced that between our ethics, our personal ethics, our everyday life, and the great political and social and economic structures, there were analytical relations . . . I think we have to get rid o f this idea o f an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures.19 B oth men, that is to say, spontaneously reinvent David Hum e, having perhaps never read him, and hold out for a rigorous delimitation between fact and value, the antithetical language games o f description and prescription. In Lyotard’s case, this view is clearly influenced by the Sophists, who denied all connection between moral and social knowledge. S u ch a rigid duality o f discourses is, one might think, a curious move for a post-structuralist to make. In a travesty o f the later W ittgenstein, Lyotard claims that each language game must be conducted in its autonomous singularity, its ‘purity’ scrupulously preserved. Injustice com es about when one such language game im poses itself upon another. There is no recollection here o f W ittgenstein’s insistence on those com plex ‘family resem blances’ which, like the overlapping fibres o f a rope, interweave our various language gam es in real but non-essentialistic ways. N or does Lyotard seem to appreciate that all prescriptions necessarily implicate claims 397

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about the w ay the w orld is. T h e re is no point in my clam ourin g for the overthrow o f capitalism if the system sank w ithout trace a good century ag o and I have sim ply not noticed. P rescriptions for Lyotard are thus left hanging in the air, cu t o ff from any rational know ledge o f society. T h e r e is no such thing as political know ledge, w hatever the A frican N ation al C o n g re ss may think it is up to. T h u s su sp en d ed in vacant sp a ce , the prescriptive or political is left to the m ercies o f intuitionism, decisionism , conventionalism, consequentialism , sophistry and casuistry, all o f which Lyotard tries on from rime to tim e in a gam ut o f intriguing perm utations. Lyotard is som ew hat wary o f ethical conventionalism , these days p erh aps the m ost fashionable substitute for classical m oral theory. T h is is partly becau se like m ost p ost-structuralists he has a purely form alist su sp icio n o f social co n sen su s as such, w hatever its particular content, b u t partly because in this text he now m ore clearly recognizes that a view o f the m oral good as doxa, opinion, w hat m ost people happen to hold, in principle lets in fascism . W hat h e turns to m ost regularly, then, is a cu rious am algam o f S op h ism an d K antianism the latter operatin g as a kind o f politicized version o f the Critique o f Judgement in which m oral or political judgem en t can occu r ‘without goin g th rough a conceptual system that could serve a s a criterion for p ractice’ (p . 18). S u c h ju dgin g without con cepts is clearly a derivative o f K a n t’s aesth etic taste. Ju d g e m e n t is to be based not on concepts, principles o r general theories, but on a kind o f K an tian productive im agination, a future-orien ted m axim ization o f possibilities which elu des the concept, continually invents new gam es and m oves, and has its clo se st analogy in avant-garde artistic experim ent or in the so called ‘paralogical’ science which Lyotard celebrates in The Postmodern Condition. It is thus to K an t’s third Critique that Lyotard h as recourse, not to the Critique o f Practical Reason; for that work cen tres upon the idea o f an au to n o m ou s will, and any such autonom y is for Lyotard an illusion. In d eed he m entions en passant that because o f this rejection o f the auton om ou s su b ject he has com e to discard the political goal o f self-m an agem en t. T h e post-structuralist deccntring o f the sub ject, in other w ords, resu lts here in a dism issal o f the b e lie f that m en and wom en in society should as far as p ossible control and determ ine their own condition s o f life. P rcscriptives, Lyotard proclaim s, cannot be justified. T h e law, as with the M o saic code, is utterly m ysterious, prom ulgated out o f an 398

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empty transcendence; we have no idea who is sending us the m essages in question. T here is no way o f answering the question o f why we are on one political side rather than another. ‘ I f you asked me why I am on that side, I think that I would answer that I do not have an answer to the question “why?” and that this is o f the order o f . . . transcendence. T hat is, here I feel a prescription to oppose a given thing, and I think that it is a just one* (p. 69). It seem s a strange way o f running an election campaign. What obligates us, as with Kantian m oral law, is ‘something absolutely beyond our intelligence’ (p. 71). T h e Kantian regulative Idea ‘guides us in knowing what is just and not just. But guides us without, in the end, really guiding us, that is, without telling us what is just’ (p. 77). Rather like Foucaultian power, the regulative Idea is utterly indeterminate, void o f specific content; yet it is on this, apparently, that we should base our decisions to ban immigration, unleash genocide or feed the hungry. What is valuable about this Idea is that it permits us to think ‘outside o f habit’, o f received opinion, which is no doubt as accurate a characterization o f M ussolini as it is o f Mayakovsky. I f there is a type o f Kantian categorical imperative which Lyotard would be willing to accept, it would be: ‘O ne must maximise as much as possible the multiplication o f small narratives* (p. 59). T he problem with this case is that it is a sentimental illusion to believe that sm all is always beautiful. What small narratives docs Lyotard have in mind? T h e current, gratifyingly minor tributary o f British fascism? Plurality, in short, as for post-structuralism in general, is a good in itself, quite regardless o f its ethical or political substance. What is morally just is to generate as many language gam es as possible, all o f them strictly incommensurable. Lyotard has all the suspicion o f the will o f the majority o f a John Stuart M ill, and cannot advance politically beyond this highly traditional liberal pluralism. T h ere is a problem , however, in squaring such pluralism with the regulative Idea o f judgem ent, for in K ant him self that Idea involves the dreaded notion o f totality, i s it possible to decide in a just way in, and according to, this multiplicity?’ Lyotard m uses, and returns an appropriately indeterminate response to his ow ti question: ‘And here I m ust say that I don’t know’ (p. 94). T h e only justice is that no one minority should prevail over any other - a position which stricdy interpreted would mean that a minority o f socialists would not be perm itted to persuade the majority o f society to forbid a minority o f

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anti-Sem ites from stirring up religious hatred. Lyotard’s solution to the ills o f capitalist society com es down in the end to computerized data banks, a stimulation o f multiplicity regardless o f its political content, and the narratives o f the Cashinahua Indians. Judgem ent, he tells us casuistically, must always be case by case - a claim which is either trivial or false. In one sense o f the phrase, nobody can judge in any other way; but if this is to be taken to mean that we must never deploy general criteria in our particular judgem ents, then it would be interesting to see what a particular judgem ent wholly innocent o f general criteria would look like. How could we do this, and still use language? Lyotard confuses a kind o f moral rationalism - the simple deduction o f particular judgements from general principles - with the inevitable involvement o f some kind o f general criteria in any concrete act o f judgement. W hatever the real problem s inherent in the sorts o f moral and political cases which Lyotard opposes, they can hardly be the source o f as much calamitous confusion, slippage and obscurantism as in this work. As with postmodernist theory in general, Lyotard is out to sever the connections between truth and justice - though unlike some o f the m ore reckless manifestations o f that position he does not deny that truth is possible. Theoretical and descriptive discourses certainly exist; but they are now blankly disconnected from normative questions. We are back, in other words, with the familiar couplet o f positivism and idealism, against which dialectical thought (now comfortingly consigned by Lyotard to ‘dinosaur’ status) has always struggled. John Locke, father o f English liberalism and devout racist, held in his doctrine o f anti-essentialism that no particular feature o f reality could be said to be in itself more important than any other; and it follows from this that there is no more reason why an individual’s colour o f skin should not be regarded as an essential feature o f her, than why it should.20 Lyotard’s divorce o f the descriptive and the normative is exactly in line with this tradition o f thought. ‘W e want to know’, writes Denys Turner, ‘because we want to be free; and from time to time we learn to call by the name o f “knowledge” those forms o f enquiry which we need if we are at all to free ourselves from those time-encrusted conceptions which, in the course o f history, have degenerated into the anachronism o f ideology.’21 Morality, Turner claims, is as classically conceived ‘a scientific investigation o f the social order that can generate norms for 400

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action*.22 T h is, in brief, is the alternative political case to Lyotard; and it is worth turning now to a highly innovative, if deeply problematic attem pt in our own time to articulate the given and the desirable together. T h e aesthetic began with Baum garten as a modest assertion o f the claim s o f the Lebenswelt upon an abstract reason; and it is just this project, now inflected as a radical critique o f capitalist society, which Jü rg en Haberm as takes up in our own time. What has come about in the later development o f capitalist society, so H aberm as argues, is a progressive conflict between ‘system* and ‘ life-world*, as the former penetrates more and more deeply into the latter, reorganizing its practices in accordance with its own rationalizing, bureaucratizing logic.23 As these anonymous political and economic structures invade and colonize the life-world, they begin to instrumentaiize forms o f human activity which require for their effective operation a rationality' o f a quite different kind: a ‘communicative rationality* which involves practical and moral agencies, democratic and participator)' processes, and the resources o f cultural tradition. Su ch a rationality', bound up as it is with subjectivity, cultural know-how and the sphere o f the affective, will never submit without a struggle to such remorseless systematization; and in im posing its own alien logic upon it, late capitalism risks eroding some o f the very cultural resources essential for its own legitimation. System s integration poses a threat to social integration, undermining the consensual foundations o f social interaction. As the state reaches its long arm into the economic realm, it also spreads into the socio-cultural system, enfeebling with its organizational rationality som e o f the values and habits which guarantee its own continued rule. And given the expansion o f the state’s activity in social affairs, those guarantees are all the more necessary at precisely the point where they are more difficult to come by. T h e Lebenswelt or cultural system is peculiarly resistant to administrative control; and that control may well have the uncomfort­ able effect o f thematizing and publicizing issues which once could safely be taken for granted. In the classical phase o f capitalism, the so-called ‘public sphere* - private individuals engaged in a public discourse o f critical reason - exercised a vital function in mediating between the essentially distinct realms o f state and civil society; but as this distinction is gradually eroded, with the spreading o f state activity

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into social existence as a w hole, the public sp h ere becom es itself shrunken an d d esiccated, in what H aberm as term s a ‘ refeudalization’ o f public life. T h is conflict, betw een system an d life-w orld, then p ro d u ces within the latter certain pathological sym ptom s, o f which the cu rren t resu rgen ce o f reactionary m oral cam p aign s in the W estern w orld could be seen as an exam ple. T e rro rism , for H ab erm as, w ould be another such instance - w hat he calls ‘ the attem pt to in troduce aesthetically expressive elem en ts into politics, like a sm ad -sc a le u n d ergrou n d ’.24 S u ch terrorism , h e claim s, is in its own way an attem pt ‘ to reaffirm politics in the face o f pure adm in istration ’.23 T h e politics which H ab erm as h im self affirm s a re probably little m ore viable than terrorism . L ik e Lyotard, if fo r quite different reason s, h e has abandoned the goal o f w orkers’ self-m an agem en t, effectively jettisoned the idea o f class struggle, an d can offer no convincing program m e by which his ideal o f radical dem ocracy might be ach ieved. H ab e rm as’s is an academ icist m ind, aloofly rem ote from the sphere o f political action; but his work nevertheless represen ts a political strike for the life-w orld against adm inistrative rationality, without fo r a m om ent rom antically disow ning the n ecessity o f sy stem s and system s theory' as such . W hat he w ishes to sp e ak up for is ‘the structure o f a rationality which is im m anent in everyday com m un icat­ ive practice, and which brin gs the stub born n ess o f life-form s into play against the functional dem an ds o f autonom ized econom ic and adm inistrative system s’.2'1 In the broadest sen se o f the term , he thus w rites a s a political ‘aesthetician ’, d efen din g the lived against the logical, phronêsis against epistètnê. Indeed art itself is for H aberm as one cru cial place w here the jeopardized reso u rces o f m oral and affective life m ay be crystallized; and in the critical d iscu ssio n o f such art, a kind o f shadow y public sphere m ay b e reestablish ed, con tem platin g the im plications o f such experiences for political life and so m ediatin g betw een the sep arate K an tian sp h eres o f the cognitive, m oral and aesthetic. It is th is ‘aesth etic’ dim ension o f H ab e rm as’s w ork which the custom ary, som etim es m erited criticism o f his excessive rationalism frequently overlooks. W hat gives rise to that criticism , in part, is H ab e rm as’s belief that for the life-w orld to be brough t effectively to b ear on a reified public system , its w orkings m ust be form alized a s far as p ossible by what he calls a ‘ reconstructive scien ce’ . T h e dom ain o f 402

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com m unicative rationality w orks by the tacit assu m p tion s, u n d er­ stan d in gs and know -how o f acting, speakin g sub jects, w ho would not th em selves usually be cap ab le o f them atizing this pre-th coretical know ledge; b u t for the life-w orld to act as radical political resource, its inner logic m ust for I lab erm as be d isen gaged from this tacitness and theoretically form alized. In this sen se his work is in line with the classical aesth etic tradition, w hich as we have seen in the case o f a B aum garten sim ilarly seek s, if with quite different political effects, to ch art a kind o f alternative rationality at work within everyday bodily experien ce, an d to bring this rationality into relation with the operation s o f abstract reason. F o r B aum garten, o f co u rse, such an aesthetic logic is an inferior m ode, which it is not for H aberm as; indeed the latter inverts these traditional priorities, in sisting that a tech nico-in strum en tal reason in g be conducted within the constraints o f a com m un icative rationality.27 T h e ‘aesth etic’ , then, can be shifted up a level to theoretical them atization; but the con sequen t ch arge o f rationalism or intellectualism again st H ab e rm as, justified in several sen ses, overlooks the fact that for him th ere is no theoretical answ er to the question o f why this sh ould be d o n e, o f the motive o f the whole enterprise. A s far as such m otivation g o e s, we are returned in a sen se to the issu e o f the aesthetic, w hich m akes its appearance again at a ‘h igh er’ level. In a reply to som e o f his critics, H aberm as com m ents favourably on these rem arks on h is work by Jo e l W hitebrook: It is som ew h at ironic that H ab erm as, who is so often accu sed o f hyper-rationalism by the herm eneuticists, req u ires s o large an elem ent o f judgem en t at the very base o f his sch em e. T h e way in which one ‘co m es to term s’ with the tran scen d en tal standpoint ultim ately b ears a closer resem blan ce to aesthetic taste or Aristotelian ph ron esis than to em ph atic philosophical proof.28 H ab erm as ren ou n ces all ultim ate foundations; and a s W hitebrook se e s this leaves open a certain sp ace for the return o f the aesthetic. T h e recon structive science by which H ab erm as w ill seek to lay bare the inner logic o f the life-w orld is that o f universal pragm atics, the aim o f w hich is to recon struct the invariable stru ctu res o f every conceivable sp e e ch situation. H ab e rm as’s faith is that language, 403

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however distorted and manipulative, always has consensus or understanding as its inner telos. We speak to others in order to be understood, even if the content o f our enunciations is imperious or offensive; and if this were not the case we would not bother to speak at all. In every act o f speech, however debased, certain validity claims are implicidv raised and reciprocally recognized: claims to truth, intelligibility, sincerity and performative appropriateness. It is there­ fore possible to project from this condition the contours o f an ideal communicative situation, implicitly anticipated in every actual act o f dialogue, in which discourse would be as far as possible unconstrained by external or internal deformations, and in which for all possible participants there would be a symmetrical distribution o f chances to choose and apply speech acts. If, in other w ords, we extrapolate from our actual acts o f communication and stylize their enabling conditions, we can recover the political values o f autonomy, mutuality, equality, freedom and responsibility from their m ost routinized structures. ‘T h e truth o f statem ents’, H aberm as is thus able to proclaim, ‘is linked in the last analysis to the intention o f the good and the true life.’29 T o claim to detect a promesse de bonheur in an exchange o f obscene insults would seem either ridiculously gullible or faintly perverse akin, perhaps, to Fredric Jam eson ’s startling claim to discern a prolcptic image o f utopia in any human collectivity whatsoever, which would presumably encom pass racist rallies.30 D o not such proposals move at such a rarefied level o f abstraction as to be effectively worthless? Can a political ideal really be projected from the supposedly invariable, universal ‘deep structures* o f human conversa­ tion? T h ese are serious reservations; yet there are ways o f grasping these apparently naive propositions which perhaps make them a little less implausible. Raymond Williams, whose intricate connections o f the ideas o f communication and community in som e sense parallel H aberm as’s own work, is given to arguing that when a writer ‘disengages’, he or she stops writing. In Modem Tragedy, Williams quotes approvingly Albert C am us’s dictum that ‘if despair prompts speech or reasoning, and above all if it results in writing, fraternity is established, natural objects are justified, love is bom ’.31 T h e worst is not, as E dgar comments in King Lear, as long as we can say: ‘this is the worst’. On this hypothesis, the very act o f speech or dialogue, however brutal or sterile, cannot help bearing with it a tacit 404

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commitment to reason, truth and value, establishing a reciprocity, however grossly inequitable, within which it is open to us to glimpse the possibility o f full human mutuality, and so the dim lineaments o f an alternative form o f society. *1 believe*, writes H aberm as, ‘that 1 can show’ that a species that depends for its survival on the structures o f linguistic communication and cooperative, purposive-rational action, m ust o f necessity rely on reason*.32 Reason thus has its roots in our social and biological condition, however systematically crippled and deluded our actual discourses. Truth for H aberm as means that sort o f proposition which would, did the discursive conditions allow it, comm and the free consent o f anyone who could enter unconstrained into the relevant discussion; and in this sense truth remains som ething to be anticipated rather than fully secured in the present. Only in the context o f radical democracy, where social institutions had been so transformed as to ensure in principle the full, equal participation o f all in the definition o f m eanings and values, would truth properly flourish; and what truth we can negotiate now, in a state o f unequal, dominative, systematically distorted communication, refers itself forward in some sense to this idealized future condition. If we wish to know the truth, we have to change our way o f life. It is possible to see in H aberm as’s ideal speech community an updated version o f K ant’s community o f aesthetic judgement. Ju st as H aberm as holds that communication is naturally oriented to agree­ ment, so Kant proposes some deep spontaneous consensus built into our faculties, which the act o f aesthetic taste most clearly exemplifies. And just as taste is entirely unconstrained, so H aberm as’s discursive community must be absolved as far as possible from all distorting pow ers and interests, relying on the force o f the better argument alone. T h is community ‘virtualizes’ the constraints o f practical interests, suspends them, like the work o f art, for a privileged moment, puts out o f play all motives other than the will to a rationally grounded agreement. In this sense it bears something o f the relation to our common, interest-ridden social life that the work o f art bears to the practical, instrumental realm o f bourgeois civil society. T h e ideal speech community suspends judgem ent on the givenness o f certain norm s or even the existence o f certain states o f affairs, hypothesizing the whole o f this in rather the way that the actual existence o f the aesthetic referent is a matter o f indifference for Kantian taste. T h e community has a social function, as the democratic forum in which 405

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matters vital to public policy are decided; but within its own frontiers a pervasive disinterestedness rules, in the sense o f a readiness to suspend one's immediate interests in the name o f the better argum ent. If the Kantian aesthetic representation is an image o f ‘purposiveness without purpose’, the Habermasian community is a matter o f purposeful disinterestedness. It might seem that the more obvious Kantian parallel would be with the domain o f practical reason, which like H aberm as’s model is concerned with the formation o f a pure will free o f all pathological interests; but K ant’s moral agent is a so!itar>r, monological subject, and to that extent an inadequate im age o f a truth which for H aberm as is always intrinsically dialogical. H is paradigm o f communicative rationality can thus be seen to combine elements o f Kant’s second and third Critiques, superadding the communitarian structures o f the latter to the will-formation o f the former. H aberm as has been at pains to deny that the forms o f communicat­ ive rationality can simply be projected forward as a utopian future. T h e concept is, he claims, a fiction or ‘illusion’, but one which is effectively operative in the act o f communication and so an unavoidable supposition. He also claims to be peculiarly unentranced by the dream o f a unified, homogenized, wholly transparent society.33 O n the contrary, his work has always insisted on the necessary differentation o f the cognitive, moral and cultural spheres, which he wishes to see interrelated but not conflated. H is intention, he com m ents in an interview, is ‘not to mix questions o f truth with questions o f justice or taste’34 - to resist, in short, that wholesale aestheticization o f knowledge and morality typical o f some postmodern­ ist thought, while pointing at the sam e time to the damage inflicted by the Enlightenment’s rigid separation o f these areas. Indeed one might argue that it is some postmodernists who are the true levellers and homogenizers in this respect, for all their cult o f the heterogeneous: the aesthetic imperializes its neighbouring territories, modelling them upon itself with scant regard for their discursive specificity. Unlike a Lyotard, and in the teeth o f all emotivism and decisionism, H aberm as believes that normative statements admit o f truth just as theoretical ones do - that they too must be submitted to the test o f public argumentation.35 Universal pragmatics have justly come in for a good deal o f sharp criticism. There is a doubt, for example, about how ‘aesthetic* the 406

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ideal sp eech com m unity really is - how far, in S ey la B en h abib’s term s, it acknow ledges the ‘concrete’ as well as the ‘gen eralized’ other, e n g ag e s with bodily n eed s and individual particularities. Its K an tian provenan ce au gu rs ill in this respect, since as we have seen K an t’s com m unity o f taste rigorously exclu des the body. In his m ore recent work, H ab e rm as h as lim ited som ew hat the political reach o f his m odel, su g g estin g that it applies to question s o f ju stice rather than to evaluative issu e s o f the good life .17 T h e w hole m odel w ould indeed seem considerably too juridical and legalistic, unable to sustain the w eight o f the concrete, conflicdve histories o f in terest which its participants n ecessarily brin g to it from the life-w orld, an d am biguous in its g estu res o f accom m odation o f what H ab erm as calls the ‘aesth etic-exp ressive’. D esp ite these critical ju dgem en ts, the m odel displays one particularly bold and original feature: its attem pt to span the p o les o f fact and value, theoretical and norm ative d iscou rses, which in the case o f Lyotard are held so rigorously separate. W hatever th e undoubted vulnerability o f his project, H aberm as u n derstan ds that a desirab le future m ust be som ehow a dialectical function o f the p resen t - ju st as, so D en ys T u rn e r h as argu ed , the ‘true d e sire s’ to which a currently self-d elu d ed p erson m ight attain m ust som ehow be a function o f what he or she d oes now actually w ant.’14A socialist-fem in ist future is in this sen se both con tin u ous and d iscon tin uous with the presen t, in opposition to apocalypticism on the one hand and evolutionism on the other. U n less wre are able to show that a d esirab le future society is in som e way already im m anent within the p resen t system , extrapolable from a certain im aginative recon struction o f ou r current practices, we lapse into the am algam o f disillusion m en t and ‘b a d ’ utopianism with which the later Frankfurt school, before H ab erm as assu m ed its m antle, cam e to be afflicted. D isillusion m en t and ‘b a d ’ utopia in one: for on the on e hand such a political vision, in its paranoid perception o f the given social ord er as wholly incorporative and devoid o f contradiction, can locate no dynam ic in the presen t which m ight feasibly lead to what it d esires; utopian in the bad sen se, becau se it m ust therefore discover its ideal values in so m e sphere largely disconnected from the m ajor social forces o f the given pow er-structure. In the case o f A dorno, this sphere is m od ern ist art. I f a ‘b a d ’ utopianism arbitrarily tacks an ideal on to a degrad ed p resen t, fo rm s o f left trium phalism tend to see the future a s bulking 407

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too palpably an d robustly in the presen t - in the conception, for exam ple, o f a w orking class which is alw ays inherently revolutionary or pre-revolutionary, which is m erely held back by social dem ocratic o r S talin ist betrayers, and which is even now on the point o f com ing into its ow n, a s for the N ew T estam en t the kingdom o f G o d is even now strikin g into history had we but eyes to sec it. H ab erm as steers neatly, if fo r m any unconvincingly, between this p articular Scylla and C h ary b d is, partly by virtue o f the high degree o f form alism o f his universal p ragm atics. It is the ‘d e ep ’ structures o f o u r com m unicative rationality, not any particular substantive content, w hich can form the b asis o f a certain conception o f radical dem ocratic institutions; and this form alism is m eant to safegu ard his theory against any too positive or program m atic utopian thought. On the other hand, his hope is that the transhistorical set o f criteria w hich this universal pragm atics yields him will protect him equally from cultural relativism . H ow su ccessfu l this project actually is is question able: it is arguable, fo r instance, that the norm s o f com m unicative rationality are too m inim alist and indeterm inate, too com patible with a whole range o f p ossib le ethical theories, to be o f m uch help. W hatever its grievous Haws, how ever, the general tenor o f the theory rem ains interesting and valuable. H aberm as believes, p erh ap s too sentim ent­ ally, that w hat it is to live well is som ehow already secretly em bedded in that w hich m akes us m ost distinctivedly what w e are: language. T h e good life shadow s our every discursive gesture, running beneath ou r w ran glin gs like a silent, unbroken sub-text. O u r d ialo gu es, sim ply by virtue o f what they are, point implicitly beyond them selves. A s T h o m a s M cC arth y pu ts it: ‘ the idea o f truth poin ts ultim ately to a form o f interaction that is free from all distorting in flu en ces’. 59 T h e m oral, pace the pragm atists and pluralists, d o cs not im portantly consist in ch o o sin g here and now a life-style, m axim izing current possibilities o r sim ply carrying on the given conversation with one or two b aro q u e flourishes. It consists prim arily, a s H ab erm as and M arxism recogn ize, in creating the m aterial condition s in which a com m unication about these m atters a s free as p ossible from dom ination could be establish ed, so that individuals, given full participatory acc e ss to the p ro ce sse s by which com m on m eanings and values are form ulated, could then select and exercise a plurality o f values and styles in w ays not currently available to them . Viewed in 408

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this light, H a b e rm a s’s theoretical enterprise has m u ch in com m on with the w ork o f Raym ond W illiam s - though W illiam s’s subtle sen se o f the com p lex m ediations betw een such n ecessarily universal form ations a s social class, and the lived particularities o f place, region, N atu re , the body, contrasts tellingly w ith H ab e rm as’s universalist rationalism . W illiams’s social theory refuses at once a ‘bad ’ universalism and what he liked to term a ‘militant p articularism ’, h olding togeth er a deeply pluralistic com m itm ent, a keen recognition o f com plexity, specificity and unevenness, with what becam e a s he developed a m o re and m ore resolute em ph asis upon the centrality o f social class. F o r W illiam s as for H ab erm as, however, m orality is m ost im portantly conceived as the m aterial, political m ovem ent tow ards the goal o f a hu m an e society, and thus as a bridge betw een p resen t and future abo u t which the struggles o f the p ast have m uch to instruct us. T h e p ostm od ern ist preoccupation with a plurality o f life-styles too often turns its eyes from the quite specific historical condition s which, in certain a re a s o f the globe, now perm it o f such a plurality, and averts its eyes too from the stringent, often invisible lim itations im posed upon any su c h plurality by ou r p resen t conditions o f life. T h e hu bristic doctrine that hum an bein gs arc infinitely plastic in their pow ers belon gs essentially to the epoch o f bo u rgeois R om anti­ cism , and h a s som etim es been uncritically appropriated by political radicals. K arl M arx, as it happen s, w as not o f th is num ber; as N orm an G e r a s h as argu ed , M arx held firmly th rough out his work to a concept o f h u m an nature, and w as quite right to d o so.™ If M arx som etim es se e m s to regard hum an pow ers as unequivocally positive, he d o es not co n sid er them infinitely transform able. It is m istaken to believe that the idea o f a hum an nature is inherently reactionary. It is true that it h as often enough been u sed for such en d s; but it h as also proved in its tim e a revolutionary- rallying cry, a s the reactionary’ pow ers o f late eighteenth-century E urope learned to th eir cost. T h ere is no reason to su p p o se that a denial o f the infinite plasticity o f hum an bein gs, or o f the utter relativity o f their cultures, entails an assertion o f their rigid unalterability. N o n ecessary com fort is given by this b e lie f to the various reactionary bran d s o f biologism or other m ore m etaphysical notions o f a static hum an nature. Paradoxically, a certain o p e n -e n d ed n e ss and transform ability is part o f our natures, built into w hat we are; that the hum an anim al is able lo ‘go beyond’, m ake so m eth in g creative and unpredictable o f what m ak es it, is the 409

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condition o f historicity and the consequen ce o f a ‘lack’ in our biological structu re which culture, if w e are to surviv e at all, has at all co sts to fill. B ut such creative self-m ak in g is carried out within given lim its, w hich are finally those o f the body itself. H um an societies, by virtue o f the biological structure o f that body, all n eed to en gage in som e form o f labour and som e kind o f sexual reproduction ; all human bein gs require w arm th, rest, nourishm ent and sh elter, and are inevitably im plicated by the n ecessities o f labour an d sexuality in various form s o f social association , the regulation o f which we nam e the political. H um an society is in this sen se natural, even if all particular so cieties are artefacts. All hum an beings are frail, m ortal and needy, vulnerable to sufferin g and death. T h e fact that these tran sh istorical truths are alw ays culturally specific, always variably instan tiated, is no argum ent against their transhistoricality. F o r a m aterialist, it is these particular biologically determ ined facts which have so far bulked largest in the course o f hum an history, and have set their im print upon what, in a narrow er sen se, we call culture. B e cau se hum an bein gs are weak and unprotected, especially in their infancy, they are in biological need o f the care and em otional su sten an ce o f others. It is here, a s Freu d recognized, that the first glim m erin gs o f m orality are to be found, in the m aterially co m p as­ sionate b o n d s bew een the young and their elders. ‘ F a c t’ and ‘value*, biologically essential practices and affectionate fellow -feeling, are not dissociable in the ‘pre-history’ o f hum an individuals. S u ch co m p as­ sionate feelin g, however, has to struggle hard in the course o f our p erson al an d historical developm ent again st a w hole range o f threatening factors - not only, if F reu d is to be believed, against our originary ag g ressiv en ess and hostility, but also against the harsh condition s im p osed by the need to labour, and the conflict and dom ination which arise when the appropriation o f a su rp lu s from the fruits o f th at labour lays down the conditions for class-society. O u r sh ared m aterial conditions bind us ineluctably together, and in doing so open up the p ossibilities o f friendship and love; it is not necessary to argue in a n uclear age that friendship and biological survival go hand in h an d , that we m ust, as A uden puts it, ‘love one an other or d ie ’. B ut the history we m ust evolve, by virtue o f ou r biological structure, a lso divides us and thrusts us into enmity with one another. C om m u n ication , un derstan ding, a certain reciprocity are essential for our m aterial survival, but can always be deployed for the p u rp oses o f 410

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oppression and exploitation. T h e language which releases us from the monotony o f a purely biological existence also weakens the intra­ specific inhibitions which constrain our mutual destructiveness. If we are to survive at all, it is necessary that we separate ourselves to some extent from N ature in order to control and regulate its threats to our existence; but the sam e gesture opens up a distance between the self and others, which is at once the ground o f all genuine relationship and the possibility o f exploitation. T h e autonomy o f the other is at once the condition o f creative relationship, and a source o f violence and insecurity. W ork, sexuality and sociality all bring with them the possibility o f gratification. T h e pleasure o f the sm all baby is at first inseparable from the satisfaction o f biological need. But just as, for Freud, sexual desire is bom as a kind o f swerving away from such instinctual need, so in the course o f social development the processes o f pleasure and fantasy come to separate themselves out to a certain extent from the fulfilling o f material wants, in the phenomenon we know as culture. O nce the economic surplus permits, a minority can be released from labour to enjoy such culture as an end in itself, in dissociation from the exigencies o f labour, sexual reproduction and political regulation. ‘Value’, in this sense, com es to distinguish itself from ‘fact*, and finally com es to deny its roots in material practice altogether. T h is culture is often enough employed as an escape from or sublimation o f unpalatable necessity, and as a means o f mystifying and legitimating it; but it can also offer a prefigurative im age o f a social condition in which such pleasurable creativity might become available in principle to all. T h e political struggle which arises at this point is between those who wish to divert the forces o f production to the end o f allowing social life to become a gratifying end in itself, and those who, having much to lose from this prospect, resist it by violence and manipulation. In the service o f this manipulation, certain aspects o f culture can be exploited so as to redefine the concepts o f power, law, freedom and subjectivity in ways which contribute to the maintenance o f the given social system. A conflict accordingly sets in between two opposing notions o f the aesthetic, one figuring as an im age o f emancipation, the other as ratifying domination. T h e idea o f human nature, or ‘species being* as M arx calls it, m oves on the frontier between fact and value. N eeds which human beings have as an essential part o f their biological nature - for food, 411

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shelter, association, protection from injury and so on - can serve as a norm o f political judgem ent and practice. T h at something is a fact o f our nature, however, does not o f course entail that its fulfilment or enactment is automatically a value. And there is much in the way that we have historically developed which is clearly not desirable, as ihe problem o f evil attests. Evil is not simply a m atter o f immorality, but o f an active, sadistic delight in human misery and destruction which apparently indulges in such destructiveness as an end in itself. One o f the m ost mind-shaking aspects o f the N azi concentration cam ps is that they were entirely unnecessary, and indeed from the N azis’ own military* and economic viewpoint counterproductive. Evil is revolted by the very sight o f virtue, unable to see truth or meaning as anything but pretentious sham s with which human beings pathetically conceal from themselves the utter vacuousness o f their existence. It is thus closely related to cynicism, a mocking cackle at the high-minded claptrap o f human idealism. Fortunately, evil is an extremely rare condition, outside the upper echelons o f fascist organizations; but in its strangely autotelic character it has an unnerving affinity with the aesthetic. It shares with the aesthetic a certain low estimate o f the utilitarian; and this may be one reason why we should approach the doctrine o f autotelism rather more cautiously than we might otherwise be inclined to do. T h e idea o f a human nature does not suggest that we should realize any capacity which is natural, but that the highest values we can realize spring from part o f our nature, and are not arbitrary choices or constructs. T hey are not natural in the sense o f being obvious or easy to com e by, but in the sense that they are bound up with what we materially are. I f we do not live in such a way that the free selfrealization o f each is achieved in and through the free self-realization o f all, then we are very likely to destroy ourselves as a species. Such a formulation moves, o f course, at an extremely high level o f abstraction, and will tell us nothing about what such terms as ‘free’ and ‘self-realization’ signify in any actual historical context. As far as that is concerned, the Haberm asian answer is that we simply have to talk it over. Concrete ethical life, H egel’s Sittlichkeit, means negotiating and renegotiating, from one specific situation to another, what such an abstract injunction could possibly mean, with all the intense political conflict that this entails. It also m eans critically scrutinizing the whole concept o f ‘self-realization’, based as it has 412

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historically been on a clearly inadequate productivism. T h e term ‘self-fulfilm ent’ suggests, perhaps, less o f an incessant activism. T h e fullest instance o f free, reciprocal self-fulfilment is tradition­ ally known as love; and there are many individuals who, as far as the personal life goes, have no doubt that this way o f life represents the highest human value. It is just that they do not see the need, method or possibility o f extending this value to a whole form o f social life. R adical politics addresses the question o f what this love would mean at the level o f a whole society, as sexual morality tries to clarify what counts as love in sexual relations between individuals, and medical ethics tries to define what counts as love in the case o f our treatment o f bodies which are suffering. It is because love is a highly vexed, obscure and am biguous topic that such ethical discourses are necessary' in the first place. M odem ethical thought has wreaked untold dam age in its false assumption that love is first o f all a personal affair rather than a political one. It has failed to take Aristotle’s point that ethics is a branch o f politics, o f the question o f what it is to live well, to attain happiness and serenity, at the level o f a whole society. O ne consequence o f this blunder is that it is harder than it might otherwise have been to achieve love even at an interpersonal level. A m aterialist ethics holds that when we attain to this highest value, we are enacting the best possibilities o f our nature. Such an ethics is aesthetic, concerned with pleasure, fulfilment, creativity; but it is not aesthetic in the sense o f trading in intuition, believing as it does that the most rigorous analysis and discussion are needed if what counts as these values is to be adequately formulated. It is also not aesthetic in so far as it holds to the necessity o f instrumental political action to bring such values about, and in so far as it recognizes that in this p rocess the forgoing o f pleasure and fulfilment is sometim es necessary. T h e aesthetic is preoccupied am ong other things with the relation between particular and universal; and this is also a matter o f great im portance to the ethico-political. A materialist ethics is ‘aesthetic* in that it begins with concrete particularity, taking its starting-point from the actual needs and desires o f individual human beings. But need and desire are what render individuals non-identical with themselves, the medium in which they are opened out to a world o f others and objects. T h e particular from which one begins is not a self-identity a point which traditional aesthetics, in its eagerness to banish desire 413

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from sensuous concretion, is unable to appreciate. T h is particular individual is self-transgressive; desire springs to birth through our material implication with others, and so will finally give rise to questions o f reason and justice, o f which and whose desires should be realized and which constrained. It also gives rise to the question o f the education and transformation o f what desires we have, which lies at the centre o f a radical politics. T h e incessant process o f arguing all this belongs to the public sphere, in which all individuals must have equal participatory rights whatever their distinguishing particularities o f work, gender, race, interests and so on. T h e individual particular is thus raised to the universal. It is at this point, in effect, that bourgeois liberal thought generally halts, discovering a grave problem in the hiatus then opened up between this necessarily abstract universality, and the concrete particularity o f all individuals. Radical thought, however, carries this process one stage further. For the final purpose o f our universality, o f our equal rights to participate in the public definition o f meanings and values, is that the unique particularities o f individuals may be respected and fulfilled. Particularity returns again at a ‘higher* level; difference must pass through identity if it is to com e into its own, a position disastrously abandoned by much contemporary theory. It is not a matter o f what Raymond Williams calls a ‘militant particularism’ - o f those currently categorized as ‘other’ - women, foreigners, hom osexuals - simply demanding recognition for what they are. What is it to ‘be* a woman, a homosexual, a native o f Ireland? It is true, and important, that such excluded groups will already have developed certain styles, values, life-experiences which can be appealed to now as a form o f political critique, and which urgently demand free expression; but the more fundamental political question is that o f demanding an equal right with others to discover what one might becom e, not o f assum ing some already fully-fashioned identity which is merely repressed. All ‘oppositional’ identites are in part the function o f oppression, as well as o f resistance to that oppression; and in this sense what one might becom e cannot be simply read o ff from what one is now. T h e privilege o f the oppressor is his privilege to decide what he shall be; it is this right which the oppressed must demand too, which must be universalized. T h e universal, then, is not som e realm o f abstract duty set sternly against the particular; it is just every individual's equal right to have his or her difference respected, and to participate in the 414

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com m on p ro c e ss w hereby that can be achieved. Identity is to this extent in the service o f non-identity; but w ithout such identity, no real non-identity can be attained. T o acknow ledge som eon e a s a su b ject is at on ce to gran t them the sam e statu s as on eself, an d to recognize their oth ern ess and autonom y. In the p u rsu it o f this political goal, there are m ean in gs and values em b ed d ed in the tradition o f the aesthetic which are o f vital im portan ce, an d there arc others which arc d irected tow ards the d efeatin g o f th at goal, and which m ust therefore be ch allen ged and overcom e. T h e aesthetic is in this sen se a m arkedly con trad ictory concept, to w hich only a dialectical thought can d o sufficien t justice. O n e o f the m o st debilitating effects o f m uch cultural theory at the p resen t tim e h a s been the lo ss or rejection o f that dialectical habit, which can now be safely con sign ed to the m etaphysical ash can . T h e re are now , to p arody the case a little, th ose w ho w ould ap p ear to believe that so m e tim e aroun d 1970 (or w as it with S a u ssu re ?) we suddenly w oke up to the fact that all o f the old d isco u rses o f reason, truth, freedom and subjectivity were exh austed, and that w e could now m ove excitedly into som ething else. T h is leap fro m history to m odernity h a s a long history. T h e d iscou rses o f reaso n , truth, freedom an d subjectivity, as we have inherited them , in deed require profoun d tran sform ation ; but it is unlikely that a politics which d oes not take th ese traditional topics with full serio u sn ess will prove resourcefu l an d resilient enough to op pose the arrogan ce o f power. Notes 1 T he classic account o f the avant garde is now surely Peter Bürger, Theory o f the A vant-G arde (Manchester and Minneapolis, 1984). 2 Franco M oretti, Signs Taken as Wonders (London, 1983), chapter 7. 3 Peter D ew s (ed.), Jürgen Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity (London, 1986), p. 204. 4 Tony Bennett, ‘Texts in history: the determinations o f readings and their texts’, in D . Attridge, G . Bennington and R. Young (eds), PostStructuralism and the Question o f History (Cambridge, 1987), p. 66. 5 S ee Hayden White, ‘T he Politics o f Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublim ination’, in W. J . T . Mitchell (ed.), The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago, 1983). 6 For an excellent study o f Louis Althusser, sec Gregory Elliott,/MA « S S « ?

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The Detour o f Theory (London, 1987). See also T ed Benton, The Rise and F all o f Structural Marxism (London, 1984). 7 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity (Cam ­ bridge, 1987), p. 270. 8 Peter Dews, Logics o f Disintegration (London, 1987), p. 177. 9 Quoted in Michael Walzer, ‘T he Politics o f Michel Foucault’, in D. C. Hoy (ed. ), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1986), p. 61. 10 Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, in Philost/phy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge, 1985). 11 S ee Dew s, Logics o f Disintegration, p. 181. 12 Quoted iin Hoy, Foucault, p. 60. 13 Ian Hacking, ‘Self-Improvement’, in Hoy, Foucault. 14 Sec Hoy, Foucault, p. 22. 15 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (London, 1973), p. 61. 16 Quoted in Hoy, Foucault, p. 112. 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 2 : The Öse o f Pleasure (New York, 1986), p. 27. All subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 18 Jcan-François Lyotard and Jcan -L oup Thcbaud, J W Gaming (Minnea­ polis, 1985), pp. 14-15. All subsequent references to this work will be given parcnthically in the text. 19 Michcl Foucault, ‘On the genealogy o f ethics’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), pp. 3 49-50. 20 Sec Denys Turner’s discussion o f this point in his .Marxism and Christianity (Oxford, 1983), p. 86. 21 Ibid, p. 113. 22 Ibid, p. 85. 23 See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975). 24 Peter Dew s (ed.), Jürgen Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity, p. 711. 25 Ibid, p. 72. 26 Ibid, p. 155. 27 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory o f Communicative Action, volume 1: Reason and the Rationalisation o f Society (Boston, 1984), chapter 6. 28 Jürgen Haberm as, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, in John B . Thompson and David Held (cds), Habermas: Critical Dehates (London, 1982), p. 239. 29 Quoted in Thom as McCarthy, The Critical Theory o f Jürgen Habermas (London, 1978), p. 273. 30 See Frcdric Jam eson, The Political Unconscious (London, 1982), p. 291. 31 Raymond Williams, Modem Tragedy (London, 1966), p. 176. 32 Quoted in Dews, Jürgen Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity, p. 51. 33 S ec ibid., p. 174. 34 Ibid., p. 127.

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35 For an excellent critique o f non-cognitivist ethics, see Sabina Lovibond, Reason and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford, 1982). 36 See Seyla Bcnhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), chapter 8, for a valuable summary of the critical controversy over universal pragmatics. See also the essays by R. Bubncr, T . McCarthy, H. Ottmann, J . B. Thompson and S. Lukes in John B. Thompson and David Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates. 37 See Dews, Logics o f Disintegration, p. 20. 38 Turner, Marxism and Christianity, p. 119-20. 39 McCarthy, The Critical Theory o f Jürgen Habermas, p. 308. 40 Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation o f a Legend (London, 1983).

417

Index

absolute, see Id ea, Absolute; reason, abso­ lute; sublim e, the absolutism , political 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 3 - 4 , 100, 1 1 6 ,1 3 7 , 190, 2 8 1 - 2 ,3 8 8 - 9 Adorno, T . W .: and the aesthetic 1, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 3 4 1 - 6 4 , 3 7 0 - 1 , 379, 407; and Benjamin 323, 3 2 9 - 3 1 , 3 3 2 ; on concept 3 4 2 - 7 , 361; an d constellation 342, 346, 356; dialectics 215, 241 - 2 , 345, 357; and fascism 3 5 8 - 9 ; on universal and particular 3 4 5 - 7 , 3 5 3 - 6 . 362; ice also body; cognition; commodity; contradic­ tion; ego; freedom ; history; materialism; objectivity; philosophy; politics; reason; society; state; style; subject; suffering aesthetics: as bourgeois concept 8; British tradition 11, 116; current status 1 - 3 ; and dialectics 1 4 3 - 4 , 415; feminine in 16, 5 5 , 5 8 - 9 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 5 - 1 7 , 144, 1 7 8 - 9 , 257, 3 1 3 ; G erm an tradition 116; and ideology 8 , 1 0 - 1 1 , 4 0 - 1 , 6 1 - 3 , 65, 9 4 - 5 , 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 136; marginalization 3 6 7 - 8 ; m asculine in 54, 58, 1 1 6 -1 7 , 221, 2 4 4 - 5 , 2 5 7 ; rejected by art 3 7 0 - 1 ; a s social critique 1 1 8 -1 9 aggressiveness, in Freud 2 7 0 - 3 , 2 7 6 - 7 , 410 alienation 92, 3 6 9 ; in Benjamin 327, 3 3 7 - 8 ; in H eid egger 294, 301; in Marx 206, 219, 221; in Nietzsche 267; in Schopenhauer 161, 165 allegory 3 2 6 - 7 , 3 3 2 - 4 , 352, 356 Althusser, L ou is 2 4 , 39, 41, 55, 384, 387, 3 9 1 - 2 ; on theory 8 7 - 8 , 266 altruism 60, 97, 2 4 1 , 244 Arnold, Matthew I I , 36, 60, 62, 263 Auden, W. II. 2 7 2 .4 1 0 autonomy: and aesthetics 8 - 9 , 2 3 - 4 , 2 7 - 8 , 3 6 , 4 1 , 91 - 2 , 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 2 6 6 - 7 0 ,

3 4 9 - 5 2 ; in Foucault 3 9 2 ; in Hegel 1 2 3 - 6 ; in Lyotard 3 9 8 avant garde art 318, 3 2 5 , 3 4 9 - 5 0 , 3 7 0 - 3 , 3 7 3 ,3 8 6 , 398 Bakhtin. M ikhail 10, 153, 2 6 4 ,3 3 7 ,3 4 3 , 3 6 3 - 4 ,3 7 6 Barthes, Roland 7, 379 base and superstructure 63. 1 9 8 - 9 , 2 2 3 - 4 , 2 4 2 - 3 , 2 5 8 - 9 ,3 3 1 , 3 7 4 - 6 Baudelaire, C harles 3 1 8 , 327, 338, 391 Baum garten, Alexander 13, 1 5 - 1 7 , 1 9 ,4 9 , 65, 116, 196, 197, 2 0 3 ,4 1 0 , 403 Beckett, Sam uel I I , 3 2 1 , 357, 3 6 0 ,3 6 3 Benhabib, Seyla 21, 407 Benjam in, Walter: on aesthetics 3 1 6 - 3 9 , 3 2 8 - 3 9 ,3 6 3 , 3 6 3 - 4 , 374, Arcades pro­ ject 332, 3 3 5 - 6 , on constellation 3 2 8 - 3 4 , 3 3 7 - 8 ,3 7 8 ; on faith 184; on individuality 165, on mechanical reproduction 3 2 7 - 8 , .138; on radical critique 8; on subjectivity 332; sec also alienation; cognition; commodity; com ­ m unism ; epistemology ; history; humour; materialism; meaning; objectivity; poli­ tics; time Bennett, Tony 382 Bcntham , Jerem y 62, 167 Benthamism, sec utilitarianism Bersani, l.e o 2 7 1 - 2 , 275 Blake, W illiam 159, 165, 244 body 7 - 8 , 9 - 1 0 , 13, I7„ 369, 4 0 7 ,4 1 0 ; in Adorno 3 4 3 - 4 ; and concept, in Ben­ jamin 3 3 4 - 8 ; in Foucault 7; in Freud 2 6 2 - 7 , 277, 2 8 4 - 5 , 3 3 5 ; in idealism 1 4 2 - 3 , 196; in K ierkegaard 192; and morality 2 0 - 1 , 23, 28, 3 3 - 4 , in N ietz­ sche 2 3 4 - 6, 258, 2 6 3 , 264; tee also experience, bodily; materialism

INDEX Bond, Edward 284 Bourdie u, Pierre and Darbel, Alain 196 bourgeoisie: British 2 6 - 7 . 3 1 - 4 2 , 5 0 - 1 , 61 - 3 ; G erm an 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 9 - 2 6 , 28, 31, 2 4 1 - 3 ; in M arx 8 , 218; neglect o f 8 - 9 ; see also capitalism , ideology Brecht. Berthold 8, 2 8 2 - 3 , 334, 338, 349. 3 6 2 , 372, 375 Bruwn, Norm an O . 272 Buddhism , influence on Schopenhauer 1 6 2 - 3 , 166 Burke, Edm und 2 6 - 7 , 28, 61. 277, 369; on morality 36. 4 2 , 4 3 ,4 5 , 5 4 - 7 , 5 9 ,6 2 ; on rights o f man 5 7 - 9 , 6 1 , \ee also sublim e, the; taste, aesthetic Butler, Jo sep h 52 capitalism and bourgeois ideology 61, 63, 7 3 - 4 , 9 2 , 241, 2-97. consum er 373; critique 118. 168 - 9, 206, 211. 252, 401 ; English 31; in F reu d 273; Germ an 3 0 8 - 1 0 , in M arv 1 9 9 -2 0 1 , 2 0 6 - 7 . 2 1 0 - 1 2 , 2 1 7 - 2 1 . 2 3 9 - 4 0 . 247, 309, 3 1 7 , 375; monopoly 3 1 6 - 1 8 , 3 2 0 - 2 . 333, 349, 351, 3 5 8 - 9 . 369, 3 7 4 - 5 , 377; in Nietzsche 2 4 1 - 3 Carlyle, T h om as 63 carnival, in Bakhtin 337, 376 Cassirer, Ernst 24. 42, 95 Caygill, H oward 116 chance, and necessity 3 1 7 - 1 8 , 324 civilization see civil society civil society: Britain 32, 116; and coercion 113 - 14, 116, 2 0 6 ; and culture 3 7 6 - 7 ; in Freud 2 6 4 - 5 . 268, 2 7 0 - 1 , 273, 2 7 6 - 7 , 283; in 1 legel 1 4 6 - 8 , 151, 209; in H eidegger 2 9 7 ; in Kant 76, 83, 1 4 6 - 7 . 172; in \ l a r \ 2 0 3 - 4 . 2 0 9 - 1 0 ; and morality 1 9 - 2 6 . 4 9 - 5 1 , 6 3 - 4 , 117; in Schopenhauer 168, 172; see also state, and society class, social, and aesthetics 111; ideology 3 - 4 , 6 1 - 3 , 7 5 - 6 ; in Marx 2 0 6 - 7 , 246, 3 8 3 - 4 . in m odern left politics 5 - 8 , 402; in Williams 409 coercion 20, 27, 63», 104, 236, 255, 345; in Adorno 215; in B urke 5 5 - 7 ; in Foucault 3 8 9 - 9 1 ; m F reu d 272. 2 7 5 - 6 ; in Kant 97; and law 39, 4 2 - 3 ; see also civil society cognition: in A dorno 3 4 1 - 8 . 3 6 0 - 1 ; aes­ thetic 2 ,1 5 - 1 7 , 4 5 , 6 5 - 6 , 102. 227, 341; in Benjamin 335; bourgeois 7 4 - 5 ; in H eidegger 85. 2 9 0 - 2 , 299, 302, 304, 306; and imagination 4 6 - 7 . 123. 143; in Kant 6 5 - 6 . 7 4 - 6 . 85. 102, 107. 131.

304; in M arx 2 2 5 - 7 ; in Nietzsche 235, 246; in Schclling 131, 134, 136, 143; in Schopenhauer 1 7 0 - 1 ; itealm knowledge Cohen. G . A. 2 1 6 - 1 7 , 220 Cohen. T e d and G uver, Paul 93 C oleridge. S . T . M , 60. 6 2 , 118, 369 colonialism 3 2 1 - 2 commodification 6 4 - 5 , 2 4 0 commodity : in Adorno 3 4 8 - 9 , 352; art as 9, 368, 370; in Benjam in 92, 281, 3 1 7 - 1 8 ,3 2 0 ,3 2 2 - 5 ,3 2 6 - 7 , 338; in l.u k ics 7 6 - 7 , 3 2 4 - 6 ; in M arx 205, 2 0 7 - 9 ,2 1 2 ,2 1 5 , 220, 2 4 1 ,3 7 4 ; m postmodernism 2, 3 7 4 - 7 communism: in Beniamin 3 3 8 ; in Marx 2 0 1 ,2 0 6 ,2 1 5 ,2 1 7 , 227 concept, and reality 150, 3 4 3 - 6 Connolly, Jam es 11 consciousness: in Freud 2 6 6 ; in Nietzsche 2 3 8 - 4 1 ,2 4 3 , 2 5 4 - 5 consensus 17, 2 7 ,9 8 - 9 , 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 137, 192, 273, 354. 404; and coercion 5 5 - 6 ; in H egel 1 4 5 - 6 , 151; in H um e 4 6 ; in Kant 9 6 - 7 , 145, 147, 4 0 5 ; in moralitv 3 8 - 9 ; and Nietzsche 2 5 4 - 6 , 259; in' postm odernism 398; in Sch iller 104 constellation, >estutt de 98, 99 tradition 58, 61, 369, 3 7 7 - 8 triumphalism, left 337, 4 0 7 - 8 Trotsky , I .con 378 truth: and aesthetics 35, 368, 372; in Burice 59; in I laberm as 4 0 4 - 6; in I legel 1 3 8 - 9 , 150; in H eidegger 2 9 0 - 1 , 293, 3 0 0 ,3 0 4 ,3 1 1 ; in Kant 1 0 2 - 3 ; in K ier* kegaard 1 8 7 - 8 ; in l.yotard, 396, 400; in Nietzsche 235, 248, 2 5 6 - 7 ; in post­ modernism 3 7 8 - 8 0 ; in Sch iller 104. 1 0 5 -6 T u rner, Denvs 4 0 0 - 1 . 407 type, in l.u k ic s 330 unconscious: in Adorno 348; in Freud 79. 9 0 , 262, 2 6 4 - 7 , 2 7 0 - 1 , 2 7 3 - 6 . 278 universal, concrete 3 1 9 - 2 0 universalism: and morality 21 - 2 ; and par­ ticularism 2 ,9 , 16, 21 - 2 . 3 3 , 3 4 5 - 7 , 3 5 3 - 6 ,3 6 2 ,4 1 3 - 1 4 use-valuc 77, 198, 202, 2 0 4 - 5 , 207, 211, 2 1 4 - 1 5 , 240, 3 2 3 .3 7 4

425

INDEX utilitarianism 6 1 - 2 , 65, 2S2 utopianism 229, 240, 369, 371, 407 value: aestheticizing 52, 59, 6 2 - 6 , 3 8 2 - 3 ; as autotclic 4 0 - I, 64, 81; tec also fact Vischer, Friedrich 208 White, Hayden 383 Whitebrook, Jo e l 403 Wilde, O scar 11 will: freedom o f 252, 255; in Freud 263; in Nietzsche 238, 240. 243, 2 4 5 - 5 3 , 2 5 6 - 9 , 2 6 2 ; in Schopcnhaucr 153, 1 5 5 -6 3 , 1 6 5 -7 1

W illiams. Raymond 2 1 5 , 320, 404, 409, 414 Wittgenstein. Ludw ig von 64, 72, 136, 166, 3 1 2 ,3 1 9 ,3 6 2 ,3 7 0 , 397 Wolff, Christian 116 Wollstonccraft, M aty 5 5 - 7 , 61 women: in Freud 281); in Kierkegaard 1 7 8 - 9 ; and moralitv 5 5 - 6 , 59; in Schiller 1 1 5 - 1 6 ,1 1 7 Woolf, Virginia 316 Yeats, W. B. 1 1 ,3 1 8 ,3 6 9 IitJ a tompilcJ hy .Wijf Dtnm (Society »! InJa m )

426

‘That contemporary theory would eventually turn back to consider its origins in the contradictions of philosophical aesthetics was predictable; but nothing could have prepared us for Eagleton’s extraordinary confrontation with the entire modern history of this discourse, in a book which will be indispensable for years to come.’ P r o fe s s o r F . R . J a m e s o n , D u k e U n iv ersity The Ideology o f the Aesthetic aims to present no less than a history and critique of the concept of the aesthetic throughout modern Western thought. A s such, it is a critical survey of modern Western philosophy, focusing in particular on the complex relations between aesthetics, ethics and politics. Terry Ea^leton provides a brilliant and challenging introduction to these concerns, as characterized in the work of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, M arx. Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lukâcs, Adorno, Habermas, and others. Wide in span, as well as morally and politically committed, this is Terry Eagleton’s major work to date. It forms both an original enquiry and an exemplary introduction. T e rry E a g le to n is Thomas Warton Professor of English in the University of Oxford. His books include Literary Theory: An Introduction ( 1983), The R ape o f Clarissa ( 1982), Walter Benjamin (1981), Criticism and Ideology (1 976) and M arxism and Literary Criticism ( 1976).

Cover illustration: D er Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 18 1Ö. by C a sp a r D avid Friedcnch. Kunsthalle, H am burg, is reproduced by kind permission. Cover design by Miller, C raig & Cocking Design Partnership

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