Another quote:
"Romanticism depends upon the assumption in the west of the separation of nature and culture, for before it can contemplate any spiritual union or sacred reunification, separation is required. Thus, Romanticism, developed through a series of associations—intuition over rationality, feelings over beliefs, with a sense of mysticism and oneness with Nature—as though it was possible to overcome the alienation and reification that had emerged with capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. Nature was often pictured by the Romantics as the garden, the landscape, the village, or the earth that conjured up an idealized pastoral space—a paradisical Eden—which constituted the natural habitat for the soul."
Romanticism in Australia is tied up with wilderness.
A quote that makes sense of my personal history:
"At school, many New Zealand children found Wordsworth fanciful, though they were forced to read and rote memorize his poetry as part of the curriculum. They did not understand his poetry because they did not appreciate the local topography and landscape of the Lake District, which is much more manicured, man-made over many generations, and “tame” compared to the relatively wild and uninhabited New Zealand land and seascapes. Clearly, the set of relationships between place, poetry, and region generates a further set of questions about the construction of the canon and the curriculum, the role and representation of Nature in the formation of national and cultural identity—in defining a people through representing their relationship to the (home)land—and pedagogy.14 Within this set of relationships it is easy to see how a particular representation of Nature became mainstream."
When I eventually saw photos of the Lake District I shrugged. Give me the New Zealand alps any day, I said to myself.
I never did much connect to the English Romantics.
This approaches in an academic way what we South Australians are currently experiencing in relation to our developing awareness that we need to save the River Murray. We are aware that we need to love differently on the land to the way that we have been, even if we are not sure what this might involve. The word we use to give expression to this public mood is sustainability and we connect it to the urgency of the environmental crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin.
That public mood is addressed in academic speak by Michael Peters and Ruth Owen. They say:
"Our aim, broadly stated, is to respond to the question: “What frame of mind could bring about sustainability—and how might we develop it?” In the first part of the paper, we comment on Jonathan Bate’s notion of ecopoetics and his discussion of Heidegger.....Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, as he says, is a book about, “why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology.” He elaborates further: “It is a book about modern Western man’s alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.” Restoring us to the earth is what good ecopoetry can do and ecopoetics (rather than ecocriticism).... is poetry itself .
Embodiment is at the centre of phenomenology, which rejects the Cartesian separation between mind and body on which most traditional philosophical approaches are based. As we have seen phenomenologydisplaces both the Cartesian model of disembodied rationality,and the materialist model of bodies as machines.
Phenomenology explores our experiences as embodied actors interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience. The perceiver is not a pure thinker, but a body-subject, and any act of reflection is based on the bodily subjectivity of the lived body.
In our body we "integrate" our life-world, and our lives are "sedimented" in our body. Reflection and theories are understood as secondary orders in the life-world, like the relation between the landscape and its maps.
Does this not have affinities with the Adorno of Negative Dialectics, who writes:
"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept."
Merleau-Ponty's category of embodiment enriches our understanding of human subjectivity in ways which avoid some of the pitfalls of Australian materialism (a reductionist conception of the body as a non-cultural ahistorical phenomenon) and postmodernism (the subject as an effect of discourse).
It also opens up space of "lived engagement" of the embodied subjects of within their environments. As Marjorie O’Loughlin says embodiment:
"...captures a sense of the human being's "immersion" in places, spaces and environs in which, as gendered subjects, they encounter the world as dwelling place."
Embodiment offers an alternative pathway to the age-old the mind and the body dualism to that of Australian materialism, which reduces mind to body in opposition to idealism that sees consciousness (reflecting mind) as primary and the body as secondary (ie., it prioritises the mental above the physical).
Trevor,
What I have been trying to show with the turn to Merleau-Ponty is he enables us to distinguish between the objective body (the body regarded as a physiological or biological entity conceptualized as an object in Australian materialism) and the phenomenal body, or my body as I experience it in the social world.
I am suprised by your silence on this. Why the avoidance of this overcoming of our philosophical tradition?
I experience my body (tacitly) as a unified potential or capacity for doing this and that-going for a walk, catching a ball, running with the dogs in the parklands, shopping, playing tennis or other bodily acts that involve tacit knowledge.
Hence the shift in language: from the 'body' as physical object to ‘embodiment’.
Embodiment signifies an opening to bodily being-in-the-world.This is understood to be a way of living or inhabiting the world through one's acculturated body.
From this perspective I see Australian materialism as a form of reductionism (eg., reducing an encultured social body to a biological one). This tradition, with its suspect promise of simplicity, has a tattered reputation because of its reductionism.
What suprises me is that you still adhere to this kind of materialist metaphysics and say you are a Marxist. Marx worked with a social labouring body in Capital that is quite different to the biological body of Australian materialism.
The latter could not see beyond physics. It was besotted with physics. It did not even operate with a biological account of bodies as organisms because it reduced that to a fundamental physics.
So your materialism reduces historical materialism to physicalism and, as a result, it is an impoverished materialism. We need better kinds of materialism than what the Australian materialists (physicalists) had to over.
What I got when the issue was raised was dogmatism. To move away from their scientific account of the body was to embrace idealism and non science.
No wonder the amalgam of historical materialism and Australian materialism died, with few attending its funeral.
Trevor,
I'm going to be on the road for a couple of days. Here is an article on Merleau-Ponty. it shows how he overcame empiricism, which lies at the heart of Australian materialism:
"For the empiricist, sensations are simple "raw feels" or "qualia"... which are individuated by their intrinsic character....They lack meaning or intentionality, or anything like the structure of a concept or general type ...They are individual bits of unstructured data. But for Merleau-Ponty, even the most basic and primitive data given to consciousness are intentional/directed; following Husserl and Sartre, he thinks that "all consciousness is consciousness of something".... The most "elementary event is already invested with meaning", and carries with it a kind of gestalt -- a differentiation of structure into figure and ground..."
"Not having recourse to pre-structured, intentional perceptual states, the empiricist is, Merleau-Ponty's view, forced into the position of having to make everything other than basic sensation into judgement. ....Anything that goes beyond what's immediately given in the stimulus/basic sensation (like, say, that what I see has a backside, or is a human being) must be seen as some kind of inference, hypothesis, or drawing of conclusions in the mind which take sensation as premises. This transforms the world that we actually live in and care about -- that of human action, the social world of everyday life -- from a reality perceived and acted on to a mere artifact of associations...The empiricist comes up with what it is that the mind "adds" to sensation by "building up from it" by a kind of formula: By subtracting what's actually "in" the proximal stimulus from what's "in" the structured perceptual information, we're left with what it is that the mind "adds" to the stimulus."
Trevor,
you may may be puzzled about my references to lived body as a way out of the flybottle of your understanding of Australian materialism. The idea of lived body comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It can be used to overcome the uselessness of Australian materialism, which is little more than the old Greek atoms in the void souped up with modern mathematical physics.
What Merleau-Ponty opens up is the idea that it is primarily through our lived body (as felt and experienced by the human subject) that we have access to, and an anchorage in, the world of particular places.
This also looks interesting. It is one of the few attempts to connect Heidegger and Foucault.
The emphasis is on power and its uses. Can it help us to formulate a materialism that articulates our concerns about the places we inhabit as embodied beings.
Does this lead us back to place as opposed to site or space? That is the question that should be put to Trevor. His gesture to developing an Australian materialism is pretty abstract. That culture's understanding of being is saturated with mathematical physics and so the body is represented as an object (machine) connected to other objects (bodies) through external relations.
In contrast, place is experienced by us in qualitative terms-----eg., colour, texture etc --that are known to us in and by the body that enters and occupies a place. There, is in short, a being-in-place. This gives us lived bodies that help to constitute a place as distinct from space.
The Heidegger and Foucault connection has been explored by Herbert Dreyfus here. He writes:
"At the heart of Heidegger's thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. And, just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects."
There is nothing about place, even though things and subjects have bodies that inhabit placesthat we care about and are concerned to protect?
This looks interesting. It connects Heidegger to leisure and the wilderness experience. A lot of Australian environmentalism has its roots in the value of wilderness as distinct from ruralism.
Though European romanticism was the first expression of the ecological impluses response to the initial impact of capitalist industrialization, the romantic impluse in Australian environmentalism is concerned to preserve remaining wilderness areas. This kind of romanticism, which is particularly evident in Tasmania, where the highest priority is preserve the old growth native forests from clearfelling, places an emphasis on region, lived place and organisms situated in particular places.
This means that it stands in opposition to the emphasis on historical time and location [of capital] in historical materialism and the submerging of place into empty space by Australian materialism. The latter does not think that place exists in nature. Place has been excauvated of its properties, content or characteristics and reduced to position. What exists is space. In Australian materialism space triumphs over concrete place.
What sort of materialism is that? Though it did talk about bodies --as distinct from minds--these (natural bodies as machines) were located in space.
What we need is a materialism that finds its way back to place---bodies in places.
So how do we resist a technological mode of being whilst living within it? Through different and alternative kinds of practices is Heidegger's suggestion. These include:
* local gatherings that set up local worlds, such as the family meal;
*background, taken-for-granted or traditional practices that operate to make a family matter;
*appropriate or the right kind of practices that arise out of, are opened up by, or unfold from a family gathering: eg., the right way to converse at a family meal. Brooding silence and personal sarcasm are unwelcomed and are seen as wrong.
These kind of practices bring the family together as a whole, or as an institution.
Thsi disclose a different mode of being to the technological one.
Hey Gary,
I'm likely to be out of action for the next week. I've been noting your recent entries and will coninue to monitor them so please keep it up. I am thinking about replies and will post them just as soon as possible. In the maintime, keep it coming.
Trevor,
My suggestion for an Australian materialism.
An ethically informed and politically aware environmental philosophy that arises from our concerns in our own mode of life.
Trevor,
my other concern with your defence of Australian Marxism's understanding of historical materialism and materialist philosophy is that it made no real attempt to address the question concerning technology. You say that this materialist philosophy understood the way that the processes of capitalism destroyed the environment, and that Canberra's attempts to address this can only be a corporate solution. You write:
"The trouble with the politicians that are out there engaging in genuine issues that matter to people is that they almost never come up with anything but a corporate solution. One has to watch out that Heidegger doesn’t become a convenient ideological smokescreen for doing this kind of thing. A satisfactory solution to our environmental problems cannot be a corporate one."
Your materialist philosophy is silent about how we can counter this ethically through better practices. In fact it is quite hostile to ethics as it speaks in the name of hard realist science plus political revolution. And the materalism here is the materialism of fundamental physics. From what I can gather that materialism is the articulation of human beings and nature as machines and so its metaphysics is an expression of the technological mode of being.
Some solutions are better than none. What Heidegger does is find alternative practices that lead to, or imply a new mode of being, thst is alternative to the technological mode of being presupposed in the corporate solution to repairing the ecological damage.
Trevor,
as you've guessed I'm putting Heidegger into play against your Australianised Marxism (historical materialism).
As I understand this tradition presupposes an understanding of modernity in which everything is organized to stand over against and to satisfy the desires of autonomous and stable utilitarian subjects. This also presupposed a technological understanding of being in which these utilitarian subjects dominated nature, exploited all beings for their own satisfaction and were a subject in control.
What late Heidegger does is argue that the nature of technology in late modernity does not depend on subjects understanding and using objects. Exploitation and control are not the subject's doing, since the mode of being in which human beings become the subject and the world the object is a consequence of technology's nature establishing itself, and not the other way around.
Secondly, Heidegger was critical of those like Adorno who was still caught in the subject/object picture and thought that technology was dangerous because it embodied instrumental reason. Modern technology Heidegger argued is the more and more flexible and efficient ordering of resources, not as objects to satisfy our desires, but simply for the sake of ordering. Subjects are seen as a standing reserve or resources.
Trevor,
I'm back from the shadowland of Canberra. Whilst away I noticed that you had written:
"In any case, I don’t see that an Australian Marxist would need to adjust his/her doctrine in light of environmental devastation. Surely this is precisely the outcome that Marxists have always predicted? Environmental devastation is the outcome of the movement of capital. Similarly, Adorno was not silent on the environmental consequences of economic growth. He thought they led to the total extinction of life on the planet. What more do you want?"
A recognition that the categories of political economy do not allow for the value of the environment, since they only presuppose exchange and use value only. A recognition that materialism involves both bodies living in local places and ecological reality. A recognition of the need to live on the earth in a more sustainable fashion than we do now. A recognition that the movement of captial in modernity constructed a technological mode of being.
Is that enough? One can accept that environmental devastation is the outcome of the movement of capital and its domination of nature in the name of utility.
However, in Hegelian terms there was a failure to think through the inherited categories of a historical materialism that enable it to pose as a science but, in practice, becomes little more than a doctrine. Nor did I see the turn to Adorno to soup up this materialism by Australian Critical theoriests then make the turn back to addressing this failure in the Australian context. We ended up with lots of stuff about aesthetics, literature and European writers, but little about Australia. This detour became lost in, and bounded by, European studies in academia It became an academic speciality.
It was romanticism with its emphasis on wilderness (the Franklin River in Tasmania) that gave cultural expression to the destructive mode of life we are living and the need to live otherwise.
You write:
"Let’s be frank – it’s not the Marxists who refuse to talk about the consequences of economic growth but the environmentalists who run about with their ethics failing to notice the material circumstances – the reterritorialisation, as Deleuze would say."
Gary,
Your stuff on Australian romanticism is very interesting. Say more about the line from Brennan, Randolph Hughes and Alan Chisholm to MacAuley.
I still think there is a difference between us on romanticism, for which I have much greater sympathy. Romanticism has always been a whipping boy, in my experience, a running dog. I’m in agreement with Charles Bukowski – you run with the hunted. When you run with the hunted the standard criticism is that you are old-fashioned. This is what happened to me at the recent conference. ‘Why must you insist on talking about materialism when I should use the word “realism”’? I was asked. I couldn’t tell them the answer but it is, ‘Because you don’t want me to use that word’.
The bourgeoisie have used romanticism when it suited them, in Australia and overseas, but it’s not a bourgeois philosophy. The bourgeoisie also use Rome and Athens with gusto if that’s what’s needed for the moment, but we don’t usually write all that stuff off on the strength of it. My thinking is that all this stuff is bourgeois, in the sense of the dialectic of enlightenment at least. Capitalism and Auschwitz are its ultimate expression but nonetheless I can’t throw it away. Once again, you’ve got to run with the hunted.
I am sure you are right that political romanticism in Australia from the 1930s to the 1950s was associated with the right, and that Australian romanticism is a romanticism of alienation. My feeling is that all romanticism has this element of alienation, even when there is a mythic past available, such as Blixen found in Africa, in the landscape itself. This is not very different from the romantic fantasy of the Australian right, who were only ever the dregs of British bourgeois existence in the first place. They’re the reason why Australia is such a heap of shit culturally.
This right romanticism, drawing on such figures as Hans Heysen, was used against the modernist movement in Australia between the wars. But soon the romanticism has seeped into Australian modernism itself, and with it the alienation effect. All Australians are obsessed with a wide empty landscape in which we are but a speck of dust. Until recently Europe was light-years away. Emptiness, isolation and alienation conjoined. There’s a dialectic of the city and the bush – but now I’m speculating idly. I think romanticism appears everywhere, from left to right (If these categories are still meaningful), because it is about alienation, and also about redemption and transcendence.
I also agree with you about the dialectic of reason and romance. We’ve talked about how it manifested itself in our dear old professor.
Your main objection to this way of thinking seems to be that it doesn’t focus enough on the environment, or that it doesn’t do it in a practical enough way. Is this what you are saying? You seem to think that Heidegger spent more time thinking useful thoughts about the environment. Is this the basis of your criticism of both romanticism and Marxism?
Gary,
I’ve never mentioned Marxism deliberately, because I am talking about historical materialism and materialist philosophy in general, and not Marxism. It is difficult even to say what the latter is – a political grouping? a belief that the basic ideas Marx expounded are true? an historical materialist? just a materialist? all of the above? In my experience it functions in academia and in society in general as a kind of popular ad hominem – take no notice of him or his ideas because he’s a Marxist. It’s a form of censorship.
I’m not sure how an ‘Australian Marxist’ would re-evaluate his/her ‘doctrine’ in light of environmental devastation. Whatever it is, Marxist or otherwise, a philosophy is surely not something that is adjusted to circumstances. Even the most practical sciences resist this kind of restriction. But a philosophy is something more akin to a religion. You are too much of a Voltaire for me.
In any case, I don’t see that an Australian Marxist would need to adjust his/her doctrine in light of environmental devastation. Surely this is precisely the outcome that Marxists have always predicted? Environmental devastation is the outcome of the movement of capital. Similarly, Adorno was not silent on the environmental consequences of economic growth. He thought they led to the total extinction of life on the planet. What more do you want?
Let’s be frank – it’s not the Marxists who refuse to talk about the consequences of economic growth but the environmentalists who run about with their ethics failing to notice the material circumstances – the reterritorialisation, as Deleuze would say. It’s not only Marxists who look at the material forces in history. Marxists are historical materialists but historical materialists are not necessarily Marxists.
One notable example of non-Marxist historical materialism is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Admittedly, the book is not solely materialist in outlook. Indeed the first volume is the connection between anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, which I think is a red herring. Thereafter, the book is steadfastly materialist in orientation.
But immediately Arendt distances herself from Lenin. Imperialism isn’t simply the highest stage of capitalism but rather it is the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie. And this change or development occurred for sound material reasons, because in Britain by the early 1800s national capital had essentially worked itself out. It was a matter of the end of the economic system or expand abroad. The latter required a guarantee of security of investment. Totalitarianism, or total administration, is the outcome, you could say the ‘consequence’ of the imperialist reterritorialisation.
Although Arendt doesn’t spell it out directly, total administration is corporate administration, a top-down arrangement in which all social institutions are brought into alignment in response to a consensus over imperialist goals. The frenzy of reterritorialisation that Arendt describes in volume 3 of the book is a characteristic of corporate arrangements and relates to their relative autonomy in pursuit of agreed goals. In the last quarter of a century Australian institutions have been in a similar frenzy – endless wasteful restructuring, revue after revue, downsizing, outsourcing, great white hopes coming and going, et cetera.
The trouble with the politicians that are out there engaging in genuine issues that matter to people is that they almost never come up with anything but a corporate solution. One has to watch out that Heidegger doesn’t become a convenient ideological smokescreen for doing this kind of thing. A satisfactory solution to our environmental problems cannot be a corporate one.
I was going to write about this account of the post modern human being being constituted by connecting in a world of the Internet.
But I ran out of time. And I'm too tired. I was going to contrast the world of virtual reality that I live in my work time where a lot of my time is spent on the Internet with the local family practices.These are contrasted with work. They are seen to provide something more substantive than the fleeting connections of the work world.
Trevor,
your appeal to marxism as a touchstone of social theory leaves me cold. The Australian Marxist knew the country was screwed in an environmental sense. But they were unwilling to evaluate their doctrine in the light of this devastation.
I find the same with Adorno. Here we have a gesture to the domination of nature by instrumental reason, then silence about the ecological consequences of economic growth. It was not seen as important.
Give me Heidegger's account of technological being and dwelling ethics anyday.
Trevor,
a note, as I have to catch a plane to Canberra this afternoon.
Your appeal to marxism as a touchstone of social theory leaves me cold. The Australian Marxist knew the country was screwed in an environmental sense. But they were unwilling to evaluate their doctrine in the light of this devastation.
I find the same with Adorno. Here we have a gesture to the domination of nature by instrumental reason, then silence about the ecological consequences of economic growth. It was not seen as important.
The doctrine was more important than the reality. Of course, they said they that were doing social science.
Give me Heidegger's account of technological being and dwelling ethics anyday. At least this philosophy was a form of thinking that engaged with genuine issues that mattered to people.
Trevor,
you talk about European films such as Babette's Feast. I think in terms of nomads camping in the Australian bushseeking refuge in the inner sanctum of personal experience riding motorbikes through the desert easy rider style, lost souls seeking harmony with nature, an emphasis on passion and talks about 1890s bush nationalism and national self-determination.
All that feeling, emotion and fantasizing was wrapped up in a crude marxist politics. Wrapped up because ther was little connection between the marxist politics and the romantic imagination and feeling of the romantic subject.
Trevor,
you've selected a left wing romantic from the 1960s who protested Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war to make your case.
Yet both revolutionaries and reactionaries count themselves as romantics. That suggests that political romanticism is not a coherent doctrine with an internally consistent core of ideas.
My reading of the 1960s revolutionary romantics is that they were as much concerned with self-celebration as political action; as much about emotional satisfaction as political ideas; as much about celebrity as political doctrine about Australia's foreign policy.
Trevor,
sure it was the European bourgeoisie who embraced romanticism, depoliticised the liberal social order, and transformed political debate into an endless conversation.
And Australia?
I suspect that there is a substantial discourse on romanticism in twentieth century Australia, concentrating mainly on German and French writers. It can be traced from Christopher Brennan, who above all was profoundly influenced in imagery and outlook by the French symbolists through Randolph Hughes and Alan Chisholm to the Angry Penguins and MacAuley. It is important that this discourse be recovered and understood as a significant element of Australian intellectual history.
I reckon that political romanticism from the 1930s to the 1940s, was associated with the right; it was associated with the left in the 1960s and 1970s.
Romanticism stood in opposition to the Australian Enlightenment of the early European settlers in Australia. The utilitarian settlers saw themselves and their world in terms of Australia being a ‘terra nullius’ waiting to be made through their efforts. ‘Improvement’ as one of the key words in their vocabulary: the new Australian world was there to be understood and improved. Nature was to be classified, analysed and then made bountiful--hence the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme of the 1940s and the attempts to dam the wild Franklin River in the 1980s.
Romanticism, conventionally understood as the reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment that emphasised feeling, had a hard time in Australia because of the lack of both a sacred landscape and an organic past with which the present could be contrasted. Australian romanticism became a romanticism of alienation. In our time it has become an integral part of the environmental movement and its defence of wilderness.
Hence we have a duality in Australian culture: on the one side there is science, law and economics and on the other side the arts, moral self-righteousness and emotion. I know it looks like the old positivist duality, but it does give some insight into the way that political romanticism poeticizes politics.
August 3
Gary,
You are probably right that a certain dualism manifested itself in Medlin, a dualism of unrestrained, irrational subjectivity and a hyper-objectivity related to abstract reason, but I suspect that I have a somewhat different notion of romanticism than the one you introduce on July 21. Maybe I don’t but it could be worth teasing it out a little so here goes:
I’ve always thought of romanticism in terms of the aristocratic reaction to enlightenment rationalism. Two of the most notable romantics of the 20th century period were Oscar Wilde and Karen Blixen. I’ll give Blixen’s account because she spells it out more discursively than Wilde. The bourgeois tries to discover itself, its subjective identity, through introspection. It’s a futile task. There is nothing to discover except a socially constructed and constrained subject that can never be identical with the ‘I’.
Instead of introspection, one should act. You are who you pretend to be. ‘One should be as artificial as possible,’ said Wilde. You can be a work of art. Potentially, you can be your greatest work of art. After investing everything in a failed idea she had of herself, one of Blixen’s greatest characters exclaimed, ‘I’m never going to be one person again!’ I act and I am the person whom those acts expose.
You are right that this is not an historical argument. Blixen thought that the aristocracy and the proletariat converged in their understanding of tragedy and comedy, which is different from that of the bourgeoisie. But they also diverge, the aristocrat embracing myth where the proletarian embraces history. Proletarian consciousness is historical.
I’m a bit concerned when you say that romanticism ‘infuses the technologically disenchanted world of modernity with meaning and value’. Blixen equates modernity, the bourgeois revolution, with the Fall but she doesn’t offer any blueprint either for solving the problem or giving meaning to it all. She advises merely to act as if your action was a work of art and through art redeem the world.
This is essentially the story of ‘Babette’s Feast’ that so moved Medlin. Two old spinsters belonging to an austere and severe religious community on the Jutland coast take on a cook, as a favour, and eventually she rewards them by preparing a feast for the sisters and other people from the community and from their past. One is a man of the world, who already knows the best food and wine. The people from the community begrudgingly go to the dinner but agree not to mention the food at any point. Thus, the roles are reversed. The man of the world babbles about the food and wine in a novice way while the austere folk apparently take it as unworthy of remark, as if they are the worldly ones. Meanwhile the dinner weaves its magic. At the end the austere folk are able to embrace one-another, to admit past misdemeanours and laugh them away. Art has worked its transformation.
‘Babette’s Feast’ tells the romantic tale, the tale of the artist. Near the very end, Blixen writes, ‘Through all the world there goes one cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’ After the guests have gone, one of the sisters says to Babette, ‘“In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!’”
I agree that romanticism aestheticizes everything but I do not see it as conformist in the way you do. It is about revoking the Fall, and the modern enlightened bourgeois corporate capitalist system is the Fall. Hemingway didn’t understand that this was the reason why Blixen didn’t get the Nobel Prize despite being perhaps the outstanding writer in the world at the time. Her words cannot be readily integrated into the system. They go at least some way towards meeting Benjamin’s goal: to write in such a way that your words are of no use to fascism.
As an individual, I saw Brian Medlin as a kind of concrete dialectic, a person whose ideas were torn between the opposing poles of rationalism and romanticism, but who unswervingly acknowledged that the basic point that Marx made was true – history and exploitation are two sides of the one coin.
Gary,
You’ve certainly been busy lately. And you certainly are taking the idea of provocation seriously.
I wasn’t dismissing Heidegger. He simply didn’t come up in what I was saying, but Deleuze did.
I was saying that Deleuze is similar to Adorno in that both have the same philosophical problem and that is the negation of the negation. I’m probably being unfair on Deleuze in saying that he simply bypasses the problem because I haven’t read the book in some years, but from memory he wants to adopt a form of positivity that he derives from Nietzsche. He wants to go beyond dialectical thinking. In this respect, perhaps he is not too far from Heidegger – but I’m not putting too much on this observation, although respond if you like.
With respect to Deleuze, Adorno doesn’t think that Hegel’s problem of identity can be bypassed through an act of will or intellect, or whatever it is. Enlightenment cannot be overcome through critique, as if we can say ‘blah, blah, blah, therefore that’s wrong and we need a different view’ and thereby bring about a post-enlightenment situation. These moves only ever create a new variant of enlightenment – more garbage for the heap, more dogshit, to use a term from Negative Dialectics.
An ethical problem frequently underlies this dispute. Let me explain: I act in the world but I am under no delusion that my actions are any more or less ethical than anyone else’s. There are others who seek something more from philosophy, a justification or even a sanctification of their actions. Religion performs a similar role in many people’s lives. I’m sceptical of all sanctity, all moral elevation. It’s reactionary, a return to Nietzsche’s first form of nihilism, when an abstract system comes between one and direct sensuous existence. We’ve moved on since then and it wasn’t a matter of choice. As Bonhoeffer somewhere suggests, we can’t avoid nihilism in Nietzsche’s second sense – incredulity towards all abstraction, all systematisation.
Abstraction takes people away from history. They try to do the right thing but it only makes things worse. I’ve been following the debate over the River Murray from a distance and what I’ve seen, among other things, is a restriction on water rights to be self-regulated by so-called communities, with not enough water rights to go around. People who were concerned only to do the right thing participated in this arrangement, which is nothing other than the corporatisation of water resources, while it is the corporations that dominate the use of these seriously threatened water resources. We are not solving the problem of the Murray; we are corporatising the control of the water – effectively, we are handing it over to the people who are most threatening this resource. Materialism is scepticism towards all grand plans and it looks at them with a focus on who benefits, who finally controls. From my perspective, that’s what is missing from this debate.
As I said, as a day-to-day activity we get out there and try to help the people who need it most, whether in the universities, the schools, the political arena, the public sector, wherever. We can blow our own trumpets if we like, but that’s usually associated with political manoeuvring, with power and control, and we’re right back where we started, with enlightenment. I’ve seen what Heidegger’s own interventions have done: they only made things worse. Okay, perhaps they didn’t make things too much worse than they would have been anyway but they certainly didn’t help. There’s not enough history in Heidegger, too much existence and not enough history – that at least is my lurking suspicion, my discomfort with his thought.
I guess that what I have been talking about could be called a ‘dwelling ethics’, although I wouldn’t use the term myself. All the same, I’m trying to find somewhere to live, something to ease the longing, and something that doesn’t make me feel too compromised. If I manage that I’ll be happy – for awhile.
How do we carve out a place for dwelling? That is Heidegger's question.
Through an understanding of Being-ethical-in-the-world is the pathway. This points to a worldly, finite, lived morality---to an ethos in its sense of abode and dwelling place----- and away from the abstract and systematic utilitarianism so common in Australia. This pathway suggests that values are modes of being-in-the-world. So dwelling" takes place not so much in a site or "environment" as in a "world". In the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger turns from the cultural gathering he explored in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (that sets up shared meaningful differences and thereby unifies an entire culture) to local gatherings that set up local worlds, as in a family meal.
In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger had argued that the scientific conception of space, as homogenous and measurable “interval,” is derived from a prior understanding of ‘place’ as abode. Place is given to us through the objects with which we are involved: through such involvement, we inhabit things as dwellings, as they are invested with purpose through our intentions. Thus, according to Heidegger our relations to things in the world are essentially an in-dwelling.
What we have is a philosophy of place as abode.