REVIEWS
DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE
Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the
Limits of Theory, New Haven and London, Yale University
Press, 1991. 293pp., £25.00 hb, 0 300050577.
Plato, with an apparent inconsistency which has puzzled some of
his modem commentators, condemned literature both for its
triviality and for the danger it posed to the life of virtue. It was
dangerous, he thought, in that it offered a delusive simulacrum of
theoretical knowledge, failing to engage with reality while giving the appearance of doing so. Philosophy, in contrast, he
regarded as dangerous in a positive way, integral to the life of
virtue. As genuine theoretical knowledge, it had the power to
subvert entrenched illusions about self and world.
In Inconvenient Fictions, Bernard Harrison argues that literature does indeed threaten ideals of theoretical knowledge
inherited from Plato. But what it offers, for Harrison, is 'dangerous' knowledge, in the sense Plato reserved for philosophy.
Plato, he thinks, was right to see literature as threatening ideals
of theoretical knowledge, but wrong to deny it the status of
knowledge in its own right. Literature unsettles, in a morally
enlightening way, confidence in our established ways of making
sense of ourselves and the world, forcing us to engage with the
intractable reality of perspectives other than our own, and making us aware of the tenuousness of our ways of constructing the
world. 'Dangerous knowledge' is the price exacted by intelligent
reading - the risk of being shaken from our preconceptions, of
being radically changed in our moral outlook. Whereas our
received ideals of theoretical knowledge lead us to expect an
epistemological stability that transcends the limitations of particular points of view, literature constantly disrupts and unsettles
our moral certainties. Indeed its peculiar ethical value, Harrison
argues, resides in its power to act as 'a standing rebuke and
irritant to the dominant paradigms of know ledge' .
In the context of 'post modem' literary theory, to present
literature as a source of serious moral enlightenment is bound to
sound like old-fashioned 'humanism'. One of the novelties of
this rich and fascinating book is that its vision of the ethical
importance of good fictional narrative is articulated by drawing
out the philosophical import of ideas underlying Derridean reading strategies. Harrison enlivens the truism that good literature
enables us to engage with alternative points of view by expressing it through Derridean themes of 'differance' and 'dissemination'. Deconstruction, on Harrison' s presentation of it, means
not that texts can mean anything you like, but rather that they can
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
always turn out to mean more than you might prefer them to
mean. The 'disseminative potency' which Derrida attributes to
language does not result simply in an idle play of signs, but
constitutes the agency by which we are enabled to transcend
perceptual limitations. To grasp another point of view - to
engage with another consciousness - is to see how signs can
combine in configurations other than those I take for granted.
Derrida's rejection of a fixed meaning 'outside the text', by
reference to which its interpretation might be fixed, allows us to
articulate how literature can reveal to us possibilities of how the
world might be. It is this which gives it its 'dangerous' power to
move and change us. Derridean 'dissemination' becomes the
vehicle of an ethically significant self-transcendence. Derrida' s
approach to texts - his insistence on the possibility of renewal
and movement in a text, opened up through a liberating attention
to what it suppresses and marginalises - here lends itself,
Harrison suggests, to an articulation of one of the central functions of the literary text itself.
To use Derrida in this way to reaffirm old 'humanist' ideals
of literature as a source of morally significant self-transcendence
may at first sight seem perverse. But the idea is persuasively
elaborated through a series of imaginative and philosophically
informed readings of literary texts, interspersed with more directly theoretical discussion of the philosophical implications of
Derridean reading strategies. The result is a first-class collection
of interconnected essays, which succeed both in giving philosophical substance to deconstructive reading strategies and in
enriching the traditional concerns of analytical philosophy of
language. This book is not a direct commentary on
deconstruction or Derrida, but rather a much-needed working
through of the philosophical implications of his severing of
meaning from psychic presence, in relation to more traditional
themes from the history of philosophy and contemporary analytical philosophy of language. It will repay careful reading not
only by those interested in philosophical aspects of literature, but
for the freshness it brings to well-worn issues of meaning, truth,
reference, selthood and self-knowledge.
This book, as well as illuminating issues of literary interpretation, also shows how fruitful it can be to bring together the
history of philosophy, contemporary literary theory and the
methods and concerns of analytical philosophy. We see in the
treatment of Tristram Shandy, for example, something more
than the familiar 'influence' of Locke on Sterne. Harrison finds
in the novel a 'deconstructive' response to the sterility of
37
Locke's opposItIon of fanciful, idiosyncratic 'wit' to 'judgment', with its emphasis on the plain facts of 'natural correspondence and connexion'. The philosophy of G. E. Moore,
rather than being seen as just intellectual background to the
novels of Forster, is shown as being put to the test in Forster's
fictional working through of the upshot of a moral outlook
grounded in individual access to the intuition of what is 'right'.
And the philosophically puzzling question of how a mere fiction
can challenge a moral perspective is explored through the contrasts between Jane Austen's creation of a unified moral landscape and the shifts between different universes of value that
characterise the literary style of Muriel Spark.
True to the spirit of Derridean deconstruction, the methodology of this book proceeds by unexpected juxtapositions and
disconcerting alignments. The theme of 'the death of the author'
is discussed in relation to Descartes' s metaphysics of selfhood
and its rejection by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. And the
'private language' issue, in turn, takes on new dimensions in
relation to post-modem approaches to textuality. Self-knowledge, Harrison suggests, can be fruitfully understood in terms of
the unfolding in time of the 'text' of our acts, responses and
utterances, always amenable to new interpretation by ourselves
no less than others.
Issues of the truth of literature form the connecting thread in
Harrison's theoretical discussions and textual readings. The
book critically engages with various aspects of the doctrine
Derrida labels 'logocentrism', given content by Harrison in
relation to the role of reference and truth conditions in meaning.
Harrison argues that literature's engagement with reality is mediated not through concern with reference and truth - the mark of
'theoretical' knowledge, but rather through possibilities of relating with the world through action. Literature yields a 'cognitive
gain' different from that involved in theoretical understanding an opening up of possibilities which cannot be encapsulated in a
set of propositions about Life. The concluding chapter of the
book relates these questions of truth and meaning directly to the
. theory of metaphor, interestingly discussed with reference to
Frege's theory of meaning. The understanding it conveys of
possibilities, unmediated through reference and truth conditions,
makes literary language, Harrison argues, 'constitutive' in character. And it is this power to evoke an understanding of possibilities that makes literature a source of 'dangerous knowledge'.
There could perhaps have been more discussion of just how
this 'constitutive' aspect of literary language differs from the
referential use of language, and of why exactly its mediation
through possibility cannot be understood through the idea of
truth. It would be interesting, for example, to compare
Harrison's concept of 'constitutive' language with Ricoeur's
development, in Time and Narrative, of the Aristotelian concept
of mimesis. Ricoeur's distinction between 'configurative' and
'refigurative' aspects of mimesis is supposed to reconcile the
truth of literature with the idea that it engages with the real
through the idea of the possible. It would also be interesting to
see more discussion of the ways in which 'theoretical' language
can itself be seen as 'constitutive'. But perhaps, as with many
'binary oppositions', to deconstruct here demands that we first
have a clear idea of how the terms are opposed. Harrison has
done a great deal to prise literary meaning apart from reference
and truth, to allow us to see better how it operates and what is
important about it. To then see elements of 'constitutive' meaning in theoretical writing would involve insight difficult to gain
without first clearly separating them.
Where, one may ask, in all this might we locate the language
of philosophy and its mode of engaging with the real? Plato of
course set us on the path of seeing philosophy as theoretical
knowledge, as against trivial, delusive literature - the language
of mere appearance. In showing how fruitfully philosophical and
literary insights can work together, this book opens up the
possibility of some constructive reconsideration of the selfperception of philosophy in relation to the theoretical and the
literary.
Some readers may be disappointed to find a lingering
Leavisite high-minded seriousness in Harrison's reconstruction
of some of the theses of old-style humanism through insights
drawn from Derridean deconstruction. What is most important
about literature, it seems, is its power to first humble us as a step
towards morally worthy self-transcendence. What, we may ask, becomes of
post-modem 'pleasure in the text' - of
the delight in the sheer play of meanings
that exceeds any moral importance reading may have? We read for the pleasure
of recognition and of reinforcing our
nascent perceptions, as well as for the
edifying disillusionment of our certainties. But, although the pleasure of the
text may not figure explicitly in
Harrison's analysis of the workings of
literature, it is certainly implicit in the
verve of the writing - in the manifest
enjoyment it conveys in reading and reflecting on what it involves. Dangerous
knowledge can be pleasurable, and play
can be ethically important. Much contemporary philosophical writing is neither pleasurable nor, in Harrison's
sense, 'dangerous'. This book sets an
example of how good philosophical
writing can be both 'dangerous' in its
power to shake entrenched perspectives
and oppositions, and pleasurable, in its
capacity to glimpse new possibilities.
Genevieve Lloyd
38
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
NEED FOR THEORY
Len Doyal and lan Gough, A Theory of Human Need, London,
Macmillan, 1991. 365pp., £35.00 hb, 0 333383249, £10.99 pb,
o333 38325 7.
I cannot over-emphasise the importance of a book like this for
the Left today. In any historical context, it would only be in
relation to a theory of human need that a standard of injustice
could be struck, and a sense of proportion brought to a left
political programme. Present circumstances redouble the urgency that the practical agenda of the Left be rigorously reconstructed on such foundations.
Those for whom the overthrow of existing class relations is
the centre-piece of that agenda may call this 'reformism'. But the
time is long past when opposing the central iniquity of capitalism
- the appropriation of surplus value - can absolve the Left from
further concern with the concrete details of justice. Today's
injustices may all owe their origin to capitalist social relations of
production. The overthrow of those relations, however, would
not, in itself, put right the consequences of two centuries of
capital and empire.
One of those consequences has been the ideological levelling
of every value to the subjectivist currency of desire and exchange. Famine and epidemic threaten humanity on an unprecedented scale; debt repayments represent a larger net flow of
resources from poor to wealthy nations than at any time in the
previous history of imperialism. Yet a chorus of ideologues from
all points on the political spectrum agree that human needs are
relative, values subjective, and that concern for the welfare of
others is the first patronising step in their oppression. Under this
new egalitarianism of values, each moral claim merits its collecting tin, or its two minute TV charity appeal. Indeed, nothing
could show the power of ideology and malleability of consciousness better than the prevalence of those beliefs Doyal and Gough
rebut so as to rehabilitate the notion of human need.
As Doyal and Gough point out, this pervasive ideological
malaise was fomented no less by the self-styled Left than by the
right. Now the Left's most urgent priority must be to bring some
order to the cacophony of causes competing in the post-modem
free market of compassion. This encompasses starving people of
the third world, laboratory animals, rain forests, torture victims,
people forced to be passive smokers, historic buildings, the
homeless, persons passed over for promotion to top jobs, the
terminally ill, silkworm pupae and, of course, the only too recent
beneficiaries of 'actually existing socialism' as was.
A Theory of Human Need begins by identifying a diversity of
sources from which modem relativism and subjectivism springfrom the orthodox neo-classical economic view that preferences,
summed as 'demand', best represent human needs, through New
Right sanctification of individual choice. They go on to identify
a number of purportedly 'left' contributions to this ideological
drift. There is historico-developmental relativism, which differentiates the needs of people according'to their level of economic
development: the poor on the streets of Calcutta supposedly have
the same needs as Oliver Twist, rather than those of the workless
in Britain today. There is multiculturalism, which gives an overriding value to the moral claims expressed by oppressed groups,
notwithstanding inconsistencies. Both religious fundamentalists
and radical feminists claim to speak for the oppressed, for example, but try organising a 'seminar of the oppressed' on arranged
marriages! There is the view that needs can only be identified by
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
the unconstrained discourse of democracy, and finally the overtender phenomenological outlook, which condemns any attempt
to articulate another's need as morally inauthentic. In a vigorous
counter-attack Doyal and Gough argue that, whatever its intellectual roots, relativistic subjectivism concerning rational values
and human needs functions as an ideology which denies a rational basis to claims for justice.
Their positive response is to return to first principles in a
philosophical account of human needs. This is founded on the
necessary conditions for the possibility of being fully human.
This focus lifts their analysis of needs beyond the biological, but
without leaving biology behind, since both physical health and
rational autonomy are necessary for the exercise of rational
agency. They argue that no moral theory can avoid placing a
value on the possession of this capacity, for its exercise is
necessary for persons to follow the precepts of any moral outlook. From this perspective they are able critically to accommodate leading modem positions on justice (Rawls and critics) and
rights (Gewirth) so as to construct a powerful and sophisticated
political theory.
In fact, they rather underplay just how powerful it is. Their
introduction builds on the Aristotelian notion of 'human flourishing' to define 'harm' as what stands in the way of its achievement. But they do not stress how far this strengthens the way
they are able critically to accommodate political/moral theories
with a neo-Kantian foundation. Consider how arguments from
normative 'presupposition' have been employed in recent moral
and political theory: 'fairness' is 'presupposed' in devising any
rational rules for distribution of goods (Rawls); rights are 'presupposed' in attributing duties to people, if 'pught' implies
'can', and people cannot do what they ought without help you
can supply (Gewirth); the aim of arriving at the truth is 'presupposed' in the practice of argument (Habermas).
Withholding any necessary condition for the exercise of
human rational agency causes harm, and normative presuppositions for its exercise, exemplified above, are no less necessary
conditions than physical health. Flouting such normative conditions harms those thereby prevented from exercising their rational agency, even if you impose just what they would choose
for themselves, given the chance. This is because the exercise of
rational agency is inextricably bound up with the pursuit of the
good, and so with human beings flourishing as such, rather than
as unreflective animals. Thus, we do not have to settle the
sufficient conditions for human flourishing (a notoriously difficult task) to know that the human telos is advanced if we identify
and supply those necessary conditions for its achievement lacking from the lives of so many people. There may well be the basis
here for a critical accommodation between deontological and
consequentialist approaches to social ethics, but this is not explored by Doyal and Gough, who turn instead to more practical
matters.
At all events, their arguments powerfully support the claim
for a universal human right to optimal satisfaction of basic needs
in the spheres of health and liberation. These are grounds, in
turn, for the identification of a range of 'intermediate needs'
which are empirically necessary for the satisfaction of basic
needs. These are (for physical health): adequate food, water,
housing, safety at work and of domestic environment and health
care; and (for personal autonomy): a secure childhood with
significant primary relationships, physical and economic secu-
39
rity, control over child-bearing, and basic education.
Indeed, the basis for a social policy research programme
emerges directly from the normative relations which must hold
here - namely that each person has a right to the minimum level
of intermediate need satisfaction required to produce the optimum level of basic need satisfaction. That is, only empirical
research will reveal the point at which, in relation to some
overall envelope of resources, rapidly diminishing returns commence on further increments of expenditure in one area if we
steal, say, from housing to pay for health care, and so on.
So Doyal and Gough proceed from their philosophical
theory to give a concrete account of human needs as a yardstick
to measure the adequacy with which different socio-economic
systems provide for their members, given their means. Their
perspective generates principles which bring order to the
plethora of data available from statistics of economic, health,
educational and welfare performance world-wide. More than
that, it articulates the justified demands of the oppressed and
spells out the inescapable duties of the powerful, on the basis not
of sentiment, but of what it must mean to share a common
humanity.
The authors' two-fold characterisation of human need, as
comprising physical well-being and autonomy, also commits
them to a specific politics of need satisfaction. This requires a
two-track political strategy with the aim of striking an appropriate balance between 'top down' state action and 'bottom up'
self-activity in the pursuit of need satisfaction. This is the least
developed section of their argument, mainly because the authors
are not in a position to make the same kinds of detailed study of
the comparative efficacy of political movements that they earlier
make of world-wide trends of need satisfaction.
Nonetheless, their conclusions point both towards principles
for ordering a field of descriptive political studies, and towards a
politics acknowledging that not all the classical principles of
liberalism are contradicted by those of socialism. The empty
formal rights of liberal capitalism really are a mockery for all
those who lack the material means to enjoy them. But collectivism is no remedy if it neglects individual freedom, rights, privacy and self-expression on the principle that workers won't
miss what they never had in the first place.
This book should help give 'applied philosophy' a good
name. It is no set piece where intellectual howitzers, wheeled on
to obliterate some barely defended folly, demonstrate the irresistible superiority of academic firepower. Instead, a well
grounded and powerful philosophical view is developed. This is
applied to the solution of momentous practical problems. It is
needed because these problems are currently obscured by thickets of ideology.
There will be those (for whom 'outflanking on the Left' is a
reflex) who will find this book insufficiently radical. It is quite
comprehensible on first reading, it confirms a fair amount of
common sense, and, of course, it is only a book - 'Philosophers
have only interpreted the world .. .' and all that. On the Left,
however, too many have retreated even from this, and now only
interpret texts. This book, by contrast, is about what has to be
done, and what we will need to know in order to do it.
Roger Harris
WHITHER MARXISM?
Gregor McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989. xi + 304 pp., 0 7456 0350 5 hb., 0
74560351 3 pb.
Anyone considering what future there is for Marxism should
find this a useful book. Even if you were to take issue with
everything McLennan has to say, his thorough detailing of the
many theoretical stumbling blocks and disputes which have
engaged Marxists since the '60s will provide much grist for your
intellectual mill. The problem of class identity, the relationship
between forces and relations of production, the state, revolution,
socialism and more besides are each given a thoughtful reprise.
McLennan's purpose in examining these conundrums is not to
resolve them, but rather to set out the state of contemporary
Marxism as a body of social theory, and its relationship to its
chief adversary in the field: pluralism.
He charts the emergence of pluralism historically to its high
point in the '50s and early '60s, through to its own reassessment
and transformation into critical pluralism. Critical pluralists having eschewed the ideological complacency of classical pluralism
have given belated recognition to the importance of class in
politics, together with the considerable limitations of Western
democracy. This shift towards a radical democratic perspective
mirrors a reassessment among Marxists of the importance of
democracy and political pluralism. Are we witnessing a convergence of former adversaries? McLennan argues that we are not.
The heterogeneous and problem-ridden state in which the two
traditions now find themselves, together with a number of shared
concerns, has certainly rendered the relationship less antagonis40
tic, but philosophical commitments will continue to maintain an
'essential tension' between them.
Thus, while the R. A. Dahl of critical pluralism might concede the importance of classes in political arrangements, he
explicitly repudiates any attempt to give them ontological primacy over other social groups. By contrast 'even weak historical
materialism entails an objectivist and developmental conception
of the social totality; while class analysis, no matter how hypothetical its propositions are claimed to be, registers definite
analytic priorities' (p. 166). McLennan argues that philosophical
considerations, although often unacknowledged, are crucial to
discussions about the adequacy of theory in capturing the diversity and richness of social life. This can be seen in the various
declarations of intent by post-modernists, post-Marxists and so
forth, to move beyond 'the played-out orthodoxies of Marxism
and pluralism'. The ontological commitments of the two traditions are held to be no more than elements of modernist narratives whose hold on thought must be broken by recognising the
diversity and instability of discourse and language games.
There are limits, howe.ver, to this sort of radical philosophical
pluralism. In the first place 'some degree of analytic of substantive "closure" is necessitated in retaining any sense of dynamic
structural tendencies within society, or any firm moral statement
of the general benefits for humankind which socialism might
offer' (Ibid.). Furthermore, the would-be transcenders of Marxism and pluralism in many cases merely reinvent its terms and
preoccupations. Lyotard's emphasis on 'functional complexity,
mobility, differentiation, and the absence of permanent allegiances' (p. 178) is far from alien to the concerns of conventional
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
pluralism. Deconstructionists, furthermore, have been guilty of
such old-hatisms as reductionism (in selecting 'a plurality of
texts in a given field only to condense them into a format in
which none other than the "metaphysics of presence is discovered'" (p. 173)), and (worse still) idealism (in holding that 'all
sorts of apparent entities and relations are essentially textual,
constellations of signification-potentials' (p. 174)).
While McLennan' s examination of ontological tensions is
both useful and suggestive, his philosophical interests sometimes run away with him, to the detriment of cohesiveness and
direction. A discussion of issues in the philosophy of science in
chapter 6, for instance, tends to misrepresent or inadequately
explain the issues and thinkers mentioned (e.g. on p. 183, the
account of Kuhn), as well as taking Bhaskar and his followers to
be representative of modem scientific realism. Nor is the relationship between philosophical pluralism and pluralism in political theory properly theorised, given McLennan' s awareness of
the empiricism of the latter.
Of those theorists whom McLennan regards as having made
important advances in attempting to synthesise the two traditions
or providing a 'third way', he finds that their contributions have
in fact served to restructure and advance the opposition in various respects, rather than transcending it. Giddens, for instance,
while seeking to give proper weighting to both agency and
structure, weighs heavily towards voluntarism, while his critique
of historical materialism 'shades off into caricature' (p. 214). By
contrast, 'the broad lines of the historical materialist notion of
the. transition from feudalism to capitalism are still visible' in
Skocpol's account of the French Revolution (p. 236).
The opposition between the two traditions will, McLennan
believes, continue to be important for some time to come; and no
bad thing at that: the tension is a productive one. Given
McLennan's conclusion and commitment to 'pluralist Marxism' , I take it that he would concur with Giddens' s view, which
he quotes, that 'there are no easy dividing-lines to be drawn
between Marxism and "bourgeois social theory'" (pp. 204-5). Is
McLennan's message, then, that there is or should be something
like a historic compromise in the field of theory? Not a convergence of course, but a friendly engagement? One might ask 'why
this now?' (In fact the book is a product of the late '80s rather
than the early '90s.)
The answer, perhaps, has something to do with an old problem on which McLennan spends comparatively little time: the
unity of theory and practice. He is critical of the notion of
theoretical class struggle in so far as that is taken to mean
anything more than 'serious and self-critical intellectual exchanges with alternative perspectives' (p. 131). In the discussion
leading to the 1990 Congress of the CPGB he argued that
, Above all the emphasis on the link between theory and practice
throughout the tradition must, paradoxically perhaps, be severely weakened if dogmatism is to be avoided' (Congress
Views, Issue 1, CPGB).
Marxism as practice looks just now to be in a much sorrier
state than Marxism in theory, and perhaps this is the motivation
for wishing to sever the link. It is a long time, of course, since a
commitment to Marxist theory implied a commitment to revolutionary politics, and it is doubtful whether any but a very loose
entailment could be demonstrated. Nevertheless a divorce does
raise real problems about the identity of what remains. Marxism
without the revolutionary commitment and attachment to working class organisation, as Lenin might have said, looks sadly like
a lifeless copy of the real thing.
Kevin Magill
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Krishnan Kumar, Utopianism, Milton Keynes, Open University
Press, 1991. viii + 136pp., £20.00 hb, 0335 15362 3, £7.99 pb,
0335 15361 5.
Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead, Philip
Allan, 1990. x + 224pp., £10.95 pb, 0 86003 7002.
Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen
Plaice, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. xiv + 377pp., £39.50 hb,
0745605532.
Utopianism has become more acceptable in recent years. As a
specialist academic field 'Utopian Studies' has burgeoned in
Europe and, especially, the US. Large, multi-national, and interdisciplinary conferences abound, journals appear. Sections of
the Left have also partly overcome their old prejUdices against
utopian socialism; feminism has become the site of some impressive syntheses. The first phase of the rehabilitation of
utopianism has therefore made impressive gains. It has also
brought problems, most notably a conceptual woolliness. In this
respect utopianism has been a victim of its own success. So
badly was a positive usage of the concept missed that it has been
hungrily fallen upon. The term 'utopian' has been applied to an
enormous range of fact and fiction, from Alexander the Great to
D. H. Lawrence, from interplanetary travel to a comfortable pair
of socks. Academics have found that they can add the words 'and
utopianism' to their regular papers, add a few new paragraphs,
and metamorphose themselves into practitioners of a new discipline. If the revival of utopianism is to move to a second phase it
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
urgently requires the introduction of substantial conceptual rigour.
Kumar's book is introductory. It is a clear, accessible and
well-written work, which briskly conducts the reader around the
principal features of the subject. But Kumar has an exclusive,
even restrictive, definition of a utopia, as a literary form invented
by Thomas More in 1516. Furthermore, he argues, this could not
have sprung out of non-Western conditions. This approach certainly reduces the field of study, eliminating classical and medieval claimants, as well as those of Asia, Africa etc. It also
eliminates non-literary forms such as social theory. It could,
however, be argued that Kumar has merely universalised one
form of utopianism, the modem Western literary form. Certainly
the claim that there are no pre-modern and non-Western utopias
has been contested on both theoretical and empirical grounds,
and does, in the case of the non-Western claim, leave Kumar in
the position of having to argue that the utopianism of which he is
a defender is an essentially alien device in non-Western countries. Utopianism could be construed as a form of cultural imperialism from this perspective. Whether or not one agrees with
Kumar's categories, his recognition of the problems, and willingness to intervene in the debate, is to be welcomed.
Levitas's book is primarily about conceptual clarification.
Although discussing a wide range of thinkers (e.g. Marx, Sorel,
Mannheim, Bloch, Morris, Marcuse) and topics (contemporary
utopian studies, feminism and utopia, historic commentaries and
anthologies), her principal aim is conceptual clarification. To
this task she brings impressive analytical skills and a sharp,
occasionally fierce, critical intelligence. She examines utopias,
41
and approaches to utopia, in tenns of content, fonn and function.
Thus one can look at the good society portrayed, the mode in
which it is revealed, and the purposes it serves. Anned with this
threefold distinction Levitas begins to re-map utopia. Like
Kumar she finds the field resistant to classification. Thus in an
examination of earlier commentaries she has to admit that 'on
the whole' these are liberal humanist, and this tradition 'tends to
focus' on definitions in tenns of fonn. Her main focus is on
functional definitions, with most emphasis on the Marxist tradition, and a series of incisive chapters on specific thinkers or
groups of thinkers. Her overall conclusion is that the essence of
utopia is desire - 'the desire for a different, better way of being'.
She accepts that this leaves the boundaries of utopia vague, but
that definitions such as the one proposed by Kumar are simply
too restrictive. She polemicises against notions such as 'a utopian impulse' or 'a utopian mentality' with one bad argument,
that they point 'towards the existence ... of some ultimate,
universal utopia' and one much better, that they theoretically
foreclose on the social and historical variability of desire. The
whole work is a fine contribution to the task of conceptual
clarification.
Levitas says that Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope 'cannot properly be ignored in any discussion of utopia'. With the
publication of a translation of Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of
Our Times), the English-speaking world has a further instalment
ofBloch's utopian Marxism. The first edition of the original text
dates from 1935, and therefore predates The Principle of Hope,
but this translation is of an updated and expanded edition of the
work published in 1962. Some of the essays on Expressionism
are available elsewhere in English, as is part of the section on
'Non-Contemporaneity and Obligation to Its Dialectic'. Anyone
who has struggled through Bloch's other works will know what
to expect from this text: page after long page of opaque metaphor, untranslatable Gennan puns, obscure neologisms, and
windy rhetoric. On occasions the desire to fling the book out of
the window was very strong. What stayed my hand was a
genuine gold-bearing seam (to use one of Bloch 's happier metaphors) of intellect and insight. Bloch provides one of the most
profound analyses of utopianism to be found in any language.
Heritage of Our Times is essentially an explanation of the
rise of fascism in Gennany. It does this by showing how fascism
was able to mobilise the hopes and aspirations of diverse classes.
The book therefore contains an anatomy of the dream world of,
particularly, the peasantry and the petite bourgeoisie. These (the
best) sections are to be found in Parts I ('Employees and Diversion') and 11 ('Non-Contemporaneity and Intoxication'); Part III
('Upper Middle Classes, Objectivity and Montage') contains an
analysis of various cultural fonns (music, philosophy, literature,
drama, etc.).
42
Although adopting a scathing, even snooty, tone towards
what he calls 'the little man', Bloch does not adopt the Marxist
commonplace of denouncing this mentality in its entirety as
'false consciousness'. Instead he sees such consciousness as a
mixture of dross and treasure, and as a product of 'non-contemporaneity'. 'Non-contemporaneity' is Bloch's belief that many
individuals, whole classes in fact, are not entirely contemporary
since they contain within themselves residues from earlier eras:
Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only
externally, through the fact that they can be seen today.
But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with
the others.
They rather carry an earlier element with them; this
interferes. Depending on where someone stands physically, and above all in tenns of class, he has his times.
Older times than the modem ones continue to have an
effect in older strata ...
Amongst these residues are genuinely utopian and subversive
elements which have never been adequately satisfied, 'the repressed matter of this not yet Past'. He criticises hyper-rationalist Marxists who have been blind to the potential of such
elements, thereby leaving the field to anti-rationalist fascist cooption: 'vulgar Marxism had forgotten the inheritance of the
Gennan Peasant Wars and of German philosophy, the Nazis
streamed into the vacated, originally Miinzerian regions ... '.
Within this basic insight Bloch develops a plethora of conceptual
distinctions in an attempt to provide an adequate language of
analysis: internal and external contradiction, subjectively and
objectively non-contemporaneous, unrefurbished past, prevented future, abstract and concrete utopia.
Clearly the Left has to become sensitive to such residues and
integrate them into the struggle for socialism. However, when it
comes to questions of revolutionary transfonnation, Bloch's
work is blighted by the Marxist-Leninist varigmirdism to be
found in much of his work. In one section, originally appearing
in a Moscow journal in 1937, he writes: 'The wish for a Fiihrer
must be the oldest of all. It exists in the relationship between
child and father. ... Group animals have the strongest male at
their head, hunting peoples who as yet know no division of
labour whatsoever choose a chief.' A little later the article
continues:
The Communist Manifesto still contains no mention of
leaders, or only between the lines, in the given existence
of its authors as it were, of those who issued it. But as
soon as the Manifesto began to be realized, the name of
Lenin flashed up alongside the founding fathers of Marxism, and the appearance of Dimitrov in Leipzig was of
greater help to the revolution than a thousand blatherers
or speakers at meetings.
But such a strategy is not a necessary outcome of Bloch's
analysis, in fact it seems at odds with the spirit of most of his
other assumptions.
To conclude. It does seem to be the case that a more sophisticated approach to utopianism is emerging. The new works of
Kumar and Levitas are moving beyond the mere unfocused
assertion that utopianism is good for you, and attempt to probe
the various complexities of the subject. The translation of earlier
classics, as in the case of Bloch, is adding to this richer critical
framework. The future, as utopians say, is looking bright.
Vincent Geogbegan
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
IN THE NAME OF REPETITION
Lacan and the Subject of Language, edited by Ellie RaglandSullivan and Mark Bracher, London and New York; Routledge,
1991. 226pp., $30.00 hb, 0 415903076, $8.99 pb, 0 415903084.
Lacan and the Human Sciences, edited by Alexandre Leupin,
Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
191pp., $19.95 hb, 0 8032 2894 5.
The theoretical work of J acques Lacan and his infamous' discovery of Freud' (a masterpiece, this, of pseudo-theoretical innovation) has had ambiguous effects upon the world of institutional
psychoanalysis. On the one hand, Lacan's interpretation of
Freud's texts has deeply disturbed the complacent circles of
mainstream Anglo-American psychoanalysis. Through a crossfertilization of several intellectual disciplines, Lacan powerfully
argued that the' autonomous ego' - that so-called adaptive entity
posted by American ego-psychology - was by and large simply
a mirage of contemporary ideology. On the other hand, the
hermeticism of Lacan's writings, and particularly his late attempts to designate the 'truth' of the unconscious through the
masquerade of algebra and mathematical formulas, were clear
indications of the impasses and mistakes inherent in this
reconceptualisation of Freud.
In social and political theory, the adoption of Lacanian
thought has produced similar ambiguities. On one level it is
undeniably the case that Lac an 's work has been a valuable
theoretical resource for analysing contemporary forms of domination. It has been employed to challenge the humanistic model
of ideology as 'distorted consciousness', to question the view
that subjects might ever perceive the social field in an
undistorted way, and to highlight that our current notions of truth
and knowledge are inadequate. Yet, on a deeper level, the recurring problem for social theory when set within Lacanian parameters is that all dimensions of human subjectivity, including the
capacity for critical reflection and political resistance, become
inscribed within the signifier and trapped by the Law. One major
consequence of this ambiguity in Lacanian-based theoretical
work has been the failure to develop plausible accounts of
alternative social relations.
These ambiguities, it might be thought, indicate the need to
critically rethink the whole Lacanian framework. Sadly, this has
rarely been the case. Today, and at a rate faster than ever,
Lacanians chum out Lacanian 'theory'. Two recent edited books
of Lacanian theory amply illustrate this tendency. Lacan and the
Subject ofLanguage, edited by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark
Bracher, and Lacan and the Human Sciences, edited by
Alexandre Leupin, are both products of recent Lacanian conferences in the US. As is common to the extreme idealisation of the
Master by Lacanian disciples, the reader is informed early on of
the 'groundbreaking work' developed at these conferences, of
the 'large and captivated audiences', and of the 'immense complexity' of Lacanian formulations (a political warning, if ever
there was one, to potential questioners of Lacanian doctrine).
To be sure, among the contributors are many highly established names in Lacanian circles. They include Jacques-Alain
Miller, Stuart Schneiderman, Jane Gallop, and Slavoj Zizek,just
to mention a few. Despite this eminence, however, the Lacanian
formulas that pass for theory are trotted out just the same.
Randomly selected, here are just a few: 'the signifier is that
which represents the subject for another signifier'; 'the analyst is
a master signifier supposed to know'; 'the subject of the signifier
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
is lived as the objet a at the level of jouissance'; and 'lack is the
human cause which generates efforts to suture lack'.
What is ultimately most depressing about the repetition of
these Lacanian 'formulas' is that they attribute a full-blooded
repetition to the nature of the psyche itself. It is as if having
linked repetition to the 'death of the subject', the Lacanians are
unable to understand that we could not even see repetition as a
psychical state if it were not for our capability of non-repetition
- the capacity of the psyche for new thoughts, representations,
images. Lacanian theory, however, blankly refuses to acknowledge these creative dimensions of human subjectivity. Instead, it
simply condemns the subject to an eternal repetition,
misrecognition, dis-being.
One of the most striking features of these two collections is the
persistent failure of the respective authors to engage in any way
with the substantive and logical difficulties of Lacan' s thought.
A useful example in this respect is Lacan's early account of
'specular identity'. Almost all the contributors emphasise the
centrality of the 'mirror stage' to the constitution, and consequent misrecognition, of the self. Situating the'!, in a line of
fiction, the Lacanian argument is that the imaginary order is
brought into existence only after the self is reflected as an object.
On this view, the perception of the 'self' reflected in the surface
of an other is inseparable from a misrecognition of our true
subjecthood. In short, the small infant in the 'mirror' jubilantly
imagines itself to possess a unity and completeness that it actually lacks - the 'truth' of the subject being the disunity of its
bodily drives.
While it is undeniable that Freud viewed miscognition as
internally tied to ego-formation, the Lacanian reformulation of
this process encounters a number of logical problems. For example, how does the individual subject recognise or identity itself
from its mirror-image? How, exactly, does it cash in on this
conferring of 'selfhood'? The problem here is that surely for an
individual to begin to recognise itself in the 'mirror' it must
already possess the imaginary capacities for identification and
representation; what Freud named psychical reality.
These objections to Lacan' s theory of an inescapable
misrecognition of selfhood are hardly new. When Cornelius
Castoriadis first pointed to the antinomies of Lacan' s specular
logic some twenty years ago, his was then a lone voice in
poststructuralist Paris. But, since that time, extensive critiques of
Lacan's theory have been developed by, among others, Jean
Laplanche in psychoanalysis, Manfred Frank in philosophy, and,
via a complex reworking of Lacanian themes, Julia Kristeva in
literary theory. For these reasons, it is surely incomprehensible
that the Lacanians should keep blindly repeating that the self is
always subjected to misrecognition - unless we understand this
as some form of negation, as a last ditch effort to hold firm to
their faltering 'logic'.
Many Lacanians, of course, would claim to have a kind of
solution to these problems. It was precisely in order to understand what motivates the subject to search for particular mirrored-images, the Lacanians would no doubt point out, that
Lacan introduced the concept of the objet a. Indeed, in Ellie
Ragland-Sullivan's essay 'Stealing Material' (which appears in
the volume edited by Leupin) this notion of unconscious objects
is understood as causative of both imaginary referents and identifications. According to Ragland-Sullivan, the objets a may
43
comprise any part of the subject (breast, gaze, lips, phallus,
voice) that fail to be mirrored. The important point about such
objects, she argues, is that they are allied to the function of lack
and serve to provide a representational lining of subjectivity.
The objet a, in short, causes certain imaginary fantasies that
'cover over' that gap which is at the heart of human subjectivity.
Yet it is not hard to see, in my view, that formulations such as
these are still unsatisfactory. Lacan's account of the objet a
renders the unconscious imaginary merely a derivative realm. To
parody this case somewhat: how can a lacking object cause the
imaginary to form certain images and representations? Where
does the unconscious imaginary get this representational capacity from? Surely it cannot be from the lacking object itself, either
specularised or repressed, since this would do away with the
notion of psychical reality entirely. The problem here is that the
Lacanians have simply got things the wrong way round. The
lacking object itself can only come to exist as lacking to the
extent that it is invested with unconscious desire. The first partobject which is privileged in psychoanalytic theory, the breast, is
at once present and absent (or at least always potentially absent).
This first object, and all subsequent object-loss, can only be
constituted for the individual through an original relation to the
unconscious. But having bracketed the unconscious to those
secondary formations of language and symbolic residues, the
Lacanians have no coherent way of conceptualising this. Instead,
they reduce the imaginary to little more than a 'sideshow' always and everywhere suturing that lack in the subject's being.
Lacan's contribution to psychoanalytic theory in the Englishspeaking world, it is often argued, has been under-appreciated
because of the concern over the nature of Lacanian clinical
practice. (Lacan was expelled from the International PsychoAnalytical Association for introducing 'short analytic sessions';
which often consisted of no more than a few minutes.)
The reasons for questioning the benefits of Lacanian clinical
practice, I think, are certainly valid if the contributions in the
volume edited by Ragland-Sullivan and Bracher are any indica-
tion of the current state of things. In his essay 'Language: Much
Ado About What?', Jacques-Alain Miller argues that it is because of our concern and preoccupation with signifiers - our
'ado' about language - that some people go to see psychoanalysts in the first place. But what are exactly the patient's reasons,
one might be left wondering, for ever seeing a Lacanian analyst
about this 'ado'? For, according to Miller, 'to speak is always to
speak about nothing'. Having revealed that nothingness structures our language, and hence our reality, the only thing that
becomes clear in Miller's article is why Lacanians actually run
'short sessions'. If the subject is in any event condemned to disbeing and lack, why bother to drag it out for the 50-minute
psychoanalytic hour?
In Russell Grigg's essay 'Signifier, Object, and the Transference', which is by far the most impressive contribution to the
collection, a sustained argument is developed about the possibilities of reconciling the subject to its own misrecognition.
Grigg contends that psychoanalysis is not about 'moral re-education' - as it has so become in the hands of certain analysts - but
is about 'the absence of control and direction'; it should encourage the patient to reject the analyst as a 'Master signifier' and to
confront the painful 'lack' of desire itself.
Despite the cogency of these remarks within Lacanian terms,
however, Grigg's paper reveals, almost in spite of itself, that
Lacanianism is a static doctrine. It has nothing to say about the
relation between the unconscious and conscious self-identity,
since the latter is ruled out as mere imaginary fantasy. It has
nothing to say about the project of critically reflecting upon
unconscious representations and affects, and of seeking to alter
their relation to consciousness. In one sense, of course, evaluating Lacanian theory in such terms is to invite disappointment.
How could it make a contribution to these matters - indeed, how
could the Lacanian analyst ever make an active and creative
interpretation - when its own theoretical base rules this out a
priori. Lacanian theory and practice, as these volumes testify,
has succumbed to the very destructive psychic processes which
it should be concerned to comprehend.
Anthony Elliott
REIFICATION
Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought, and Politics,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1991. xv + 538pp., £25.00 hb, 1557861145.
Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) had an extraordinary life as a philosopher, literary critic, and (between 1919 and 1929) one of the
leaders of the Hungarian Communist movement. There is still no
adequate biography; although the main facts of his life are
known; and there are excellent studies of particular aspects of his
thought, e.g. by Michael Lowy, and by Istvan Meszaros (whose
Lukacs' Concept of Dialectic contains fifty pages of biographical data). His adherence to Marxism came relatively late and
relatively suddenly. In December 1918 he joined the Communist
Party, and during the months of the Hungarian Commune of
1919 he served as Commissar of Education and Culture. At the
same time he was a political commissar at the war front. A frail
bespectacled figure in plus fours and green stockings, he stunned
the soldiers by strolling along the top of the trench ignoring the
hail of bullets from the Czech side; he also had deserters shot.
His most famous work, History and Class Consciousness,
appeared in 1923. In spite of being condemned at the time by the
44
President of the Comintern, it had an enormous influence on
'Western Marxism', and European thought generally. It is particularly impressive in fore grounding the theme of reification in
Marxist thought, at a time when Marx' s 1844 Manuscripts were
not known. In it Lukacs argues that dialectical method embraces
the historicity of human practice, the self-reflective nature of
dialectic, the category of social totality, and the critique of all
forms of reified consciousness.
As punishment for advocating 'popular front' politics before
Stalin was ready for it, Lukacs was 'cominterned' in Moscow,
and began a complicated career of intellectual production and
obligatory self-criticism. The 1844 Manuscripts were discovered in time to inform the last part of his homage to Hegel: The
Young Hegel. Although Lowy thinks this work is a symptom of
Lukacs's 'reconciliation' with Stalinist reality, it cannot be denied that it enormously enriches our understanding of Hegel and
Marx.
Lukacs returned to Hungary after the war; but he held high
office only briefly, as Minister of Culture in Nagy's ill-fated
government of 1956. After its overthrow he refused to make any
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
more' self-criticisms'. Thus it is important to understand that the
1967 Preface is perfectly sincere in its adumbration of defects in
History and Class Consciousness.
Unfortunately for us, of his last major work, Towards an
Ontology of Social Being, only three chapters have appeared in
English; some obscure dispute over rights seems to have permanently stalled the process.
The dust jacket of Kadarkay' s book carries puffs from a trio
of luminaries: Eagleton ('magisterial study'); McLellan ('a
splendid achievement'); and Kolakowski ('the best'). I can see
why Kolakowski liked it, because it fits in with his anti-communist prejudices. But I am a bit surprised at Eagleton's endorsement; for the book is 'magisterial' only in that it is very big. The
author has certainly spent the midnight hour in the Lukacs
archive transcribing letters (sometimes without getting explicit
permission from writers to reproduce extracts, I happen to
know). But, in spite of the author's detailed factual research, I
found the result rather disappointing. In fact, the subtitle (Life,
Thought, Politics) is misleading. There is a lot on the 'Life';
something on politics, something on literary criticism; and virtually nothing on philosophy. Thus you will learn little of Georg
Lukacs's thought here (it is symptomatic that the Ontology gets
only half a page, and that on his students' dissatisfaction with it).
On the other hand, you will become very well informed about the
love affairs of a generation of Hungarian intellectuals.
In approaching Lukacs' s works, Kadarkay employs that
most irritating method of intellectual biography: psychologising
reductionism. All Lukacs's work, it seems, expresses his 'inner
drama'. So how come those having good relations with fathers
and straightforward love-lives find it so valuable and challenging? The framework of analysis is primarily ethical. Thus
Lukacs 's political commitment is interpreted in Dostoievskyan
terms as a decision to embrace 'the dialectic of evil'. Ludicrously, we are told that the key to History and Class Consciousness is that St. Augustine 'exerted a powerful influence on
Lukacs'. Given this, it is no surprise to learn that the proletariat is
cognitively privileged because of its 'suffering'.
Many people are said here to have 'profoundly influenced'
. Lukacs: but not, bizarrely enough, Marx! 'Reading Marx one
gains insight into Shaw. But reading Marx offers little insight
into Lukacs.' (Modelling myself on my author now) I speculate
that this verdict is not unconnected with the fact that Kadarkay is
himself entirely innocent of any knowledge of Marx. This makes
him peculiarly unsuited to explaining Lukacs' s contribution to
Marxism, of course. Wisely, he does not try, restricting himself
to the usual platitudes about the rediscovery of Hegel in Marx.
The narrative grip of the book is a bit uncertain; and important events (e.g. the outbreak of World War 11) are elided. But
something worse happens with the book's treatment of the
Lukacs-Sartre debates after the War. No punches were pulled on
either side - as may be seen in Lukacs' s 'Existentialism or
Marxism' (available in G. Novack, ed., Existentialism versus
Marxism, 1966). Even when, in 1957, Sartre attempted a juncture with Marx (in The Problem of Method, Methuen, 1963),
modem Marxism in general, and Lukacs in particular, got a lot of
stick. Although in 1956 Lukacs had made sharp criticisms of
Stalinism's 'sectarian subjectivism', Sartre recognised this only
in a grudging way by writing: 'It is not by chance that Lukacs ...
has found in 1956 the best definition of this frozen Marxism.
Twenty years of practice give him all the authority necessary to
call this pseudo-philosophy a voluntarist idealisfn' (p. 28).
However, Lukacs was targeted for somewhat accidental reasons. According to Meszaros, in February 1956 Sartre had contrasted the deplorable state of Marxism in the French CP with
Lukacs's achievement: 'the only one in Europe to explain from
their causes the movements of contemporary thought'. But
Sartre's attitude changed sharply in 1957 after Lukacs's release
from the Rumanian castle where the former Nagy government
was held. Sartre mistakenly believed that Lukacs had
gone to join the Kadar regime! Hence in the draft of
Method that appeared in Les Temps Modernes Lukacs
as a person, and as an intellectual, is traduced. In late
1957 Meszaros reported to Lukacs that Sartre 'expressed regret for it, saying that he was misled and
would correct the offensive remarks'. He expressed
Willingness to resume dialogue: and Lukacs replied to
Meszaros that such an intellectual rapprochement
'should be taken seriously'. But nothing came of it.
Indeed, while the mistakes were eliminated from the
1960 publication of Method, it is disappointing that
Sartre did not bother to find a more deserving target: the
passage quoted above remained. Kadarkay' s treatment
of all this is muddled; and into the bargain he misquotes
the passage as 'his frozen Marxism' (p. 446).
To conclude, this is the 'life' without the 'thought'.
What is needed now is a full intellectual biography,
showing just why Georg Lukacs was - and here I agree
with the book - 'the greatest Marxist intellectual of the
twentieth century' .
Chris Arthur
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
45
LANGUAGE? WHAT LANGUAGE?
David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (paperback edition), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1991. 472pp., £14.95, 0 521 424437
David Holdcroft, Saussure: Signs, System and Arbitrariness,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. 180pp., £25.00
hb, 0 521 32618, £8.95 pb, 0 521 33918.
The great leap forward in twentieth-century philosophy, they
often tell us, was - in Gustav Bergmann's lucky phrase - the
'linguistic turn'. Instead of minds and ideas and world-views,
philosophers started talking about sentences and words and
texts. The linguistic turn has, however, meant a great variety of
things. Some have listened out for the nuances of Greek or
English or German (Austin, Heidegger); others have taken translatability into some favourite language - predicate calculus, for
example, or 'ordinary' English - as a touchstone of intellectual
propriety (Quine, Strawson); others have taken language in general as the fundamental institution of human society, and therefore the source (for better or worse) of moral and political norms
(Lacan, Habermas). And so on, and on, and on: the only thing the
linguistic turn lacks is a clear and unified concept of language.
There could hardly be a better means of confronting the
question of the identity of language than David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. It is not an encyclopedia in
the usual sense, but a single-author systematic survey, presenting a treasure-house of information about, amongst other things,
the languages of the world; language structure in all its aspects;
speech, writing and signing; language and the brain; languagelearning; and the politics of language. It is not till the end of this
magnificent survey that Crystal gets round to the question of the
definition of language; and his starting point, which philosophers might do well to take as theirs, is that it is simply 'what this
encyclopedia is about' .
Of course, the philosophers may say that they are not interested in particular historical manifestations of language, but in
language as such. The distinction they rely on here is the one
which was worked on by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, and made into the cornerstone of his doctrines: the
langage, or the 'faculty of speech' in general, and langue, the
'social product' which constitutes such institutions as English or
Sanskrit or Tagalog.
Saussure is therefore an essential figure for philosophy's
problems about its relation to language. But which Saussure?
After his death in 1913, his attempt to give a scientific basis to
linguistics was continued by Trubetzkoy, J akobson and the rest
of the 'Prague circle'. But apart from that, he was largely ignored. He was never a canonical figure in American linguistics,
and Chomsky sees him as representing the 'naive view' that a
language is 'a sequence of expressions corresponding to an
amorphous sequence of concepts' - precisely the view, in other
words, that Chomskyan transformational grammar was to overthrow.
In France, however, Saussure was belatedly adopted as a
master, not only in linguistics but in philosophy, psychoanalysis,
and the social sciences as well. It seems to have begun in the
1940s, when Merleau-Ponty would give general summaries of
'what we have learned from Saussure', without referring specifically to any of his formulations. 'What we have learned from
Saussure,' he said, 'is that, taken singly, signs do not signify
anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a
46
meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and
other signs.' Furthermore, 'Saussure has the great merit of having taken the step which liberates history from historicism'; and
above all, he had adopted 'the perspective of the speaking subject which lives in its language'. Merleau-Ponty's Saussure, in
other words, was enunciating from beyond the grave the positions which Merleau-Ponty was actually struggling to formulate
for himself.
But then there was structuralism. The structuralists' analyses
of social, psychic and artistic formations as uncentred and transient articulations of permanent elements, though devised partly
in opposition to Merleau-Ponty, also presented themselves as
posthumous doctrines of Saussure. The structuralists took over
the distinctions between langue and parole, and synchrony and
diachrony, and fastened on a passage where Saussure had ruminated about a future science which might explain 'the life of
signs within social life'. He did not predict what this science
would say, but it had 'a right to exist', and Saussure devised a
name - semiology - to be ready for it when it arrived. LeviStrauss and other structuralists regarded themselves as
fulfilments of this prophecy; and its apostles treated Saussure' s
Course in General Linguistics as proof of the legitimacy of their
own claims. In particular, they liked to refer to Saussure' s
statement that 'in language there are only differences without
positive terms', and to brandish the last sentence of the Course:
'the only true object of linguistics is language (la langue) in
itself and for itself.' Armed with Saussure' s idea of structure, so
they thought, they would expel the humanistic idea of the subject
from social theory.
The Saussure of the structuralist anti-humanists was a fantastic fabrication, however. For one thing, Saussure never talked
about 'structure'; and for another he actually referred rather
frequently to the point of view of the 'speaking subject'. Moreover, his famous concluding sentence was written by the editors
who compiled the text of the Course shortly after Saussure's
death, and has no basis in the notes from which they were
working.
In fact the text of the Course is itself something of an
imposture. The editors compiled it on the basis of the course of
lectures that Saussure gave in 1910-11; but in the process of
editing they changed both the proportions between the parts and
the order of exposition. Saussure's intended conclusion on 'linguistic value' was secreted in the middle of the book, and the
extensive discussions of the variousness of natural languages,
which had occupied the whole of the first half of the course, were
removed to a relatively brief section - Part Four - on 'geographicallinguistics'. The result was to make Saussure seem a far less
eclectic and pluralistic thinker than he really was.
It was not as though people read the Course very much,
though. It is not a particularly long book, or difficult to read; but
for some reason it has exerted its influence almost entirely
through confident but frequently inaccurate or even disingenuous paraphrases. It would be a good idea, therefore, to turn back
from the summaries to the book itself. And anyone who does so
will find in David Holdcroft a very valuable guide. His central
chapters deal with the main theses of the Course, giving full
references to the text and clear explanations of the strange
complexities of its history. Then, in the best traditions of analytic
philosophy, Holdcroft subjects the doctrines he has identified to
punishing tests for consistency, ambiguity, and general empirical plausibility. Such venerable principles as the arbitrariness of
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
the sign, the linearity of the signifier, and the distinctions between langue and parole, come out of it all looking extremely
forlorn. And the doctrine that a linguistic system contains differences without 'positive terms' may have had its day altogether.
Saussure, rather like Freud, was amongst other things a great
inventor of metaphors. Holdcroft takes these seriously, and gives
clear diagnoses of their limitations and incompatibilities. Is a
language (langue) supposed to be like Morse code, or like a
symphony? Saussure offers both analogies, but their implications are radically different, as Holdcroft shows; and the same
applies to Saussure' s attempts to explain 'linguistic value' by
reference both to money and to the waves produced by fluctuating air-pressure on the sea. And then, if a language is (as
Saussure often claims) like a game of chess, how are we supposed to account for its changes over time? (Saussure is perhaps
a little less confused than Holdcroft alleges, for his discussion
covers two themes in a way that may get lost in translation: the
game of chess in general-le jeu - whose rules have altered over
the centuries; and a particular game - une partie - which,
however long it may drag on, will presumably be governed by
the same rules from beginning to end.)
Holdcroft succeeds in making Saussure' s prophecy about a
coming science of semiology look pretentious and absurd. But
he does not conclude that 'Saussure' s overall project ship-
wrecks'; on the contrary. He sheds no tears at all for the 'structuralist and post-structuralist philosophers' who have, as he sees
it, built upon the opaque and unnecessary idea of 'differences
without positive terms'. But he raises a cheer for Saussure's
sustained campaign for the view that it is pointless to engage in
historical and comparative studies of language without grounding them in studies of individual languages as systems. It takes
an effort of historical imagination, as he points out, to see that
this argument inaugurated 'a radically new perspective in the
study of language, a veritable Copernican revolution', and that
without it the science of 'structural linguistics' would have been
inconceivable. Holdcroft's work might equally, however, lead to
a different conclusion: namely that Saussure's dichotomies,
even as they break down, and his marvellous analogies, when
they careen out of control, provide some insight into precisely
those aspects of language - the poetic, for example, or the whole
range of issues garnered in Crystal's Encyclopedia - from which
structural linguistics abstracts. What Holdcroft regards quite
negatively, as the unfortunate theoretical excesses of the Course,
can also be taken as an eloquent if unwilling witness to the fact
that what languages have in common with other sign-systems,
and indeed what they have in common with each other, may not
be their most interesting part.
Jonathan Ree
POLITICS AFTER METAPHYSICS
Michael Kelly, ed., Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics
and Politics, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, The MIT Press,
1990. xi + 285pp., £24.75 hb, 0 262 111543, £12.50 pb, 0 262
610663.
The extended confrontation between Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Jiirgen Habermas over the nature and limits of hermeneutical
understanding and the character of social criticism may have
begun in the 1960s, but its reverberations continue today. This is
strongly evinced by the twelve essays contained in this volume,
which focus on the meaning of 'critique' and its relationship to
ethical and political practice. If little overall unanimity emerges
on this question, the exercise remains valuable because it clarifies what is at stake and contributes to the 'self-understanding of
the principles, methodology, and goals of contemporary ethical
and political debate', as Michael Kelly explains in his useful
introduction. The ultimate success of such a project is imperative, given the continuing fragmentation of contemporary society into seemingly incommensurable world-views and the
virtual abandonment of politically-engaged critique on the part
of broad sectors of the intelligentsia. As such, the commitment
on the part of the contributors to this volume both to diagnose the
ills of modem society and to develop the methodological
groundwork for the articulation of a coherent vision of the' good
society' is very welcome indeed.
The central focus of this collection concerns the recent controversy about 'communicative' or 'discourse' ethics, particularly the issue of its 'universalisability'. In her stimulating
contribution, Seyla Benhabib dismisses the argument voiced by
Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and others that a formalist
ethics cannot possibly account for the contextual character of
moral action within everyday social life. She suggests that these
objections can be avoided, but only if the conversational model
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
developed by Jiirgen Habermas is reconstructed along somewhat
different lines. Benhabib asserts that universalism must be subjected to cert<:\.in constraints - specific all y, by .the .interlocking
principles of 'universal respect' and 'egalitarian reciprocity' - if
the formal process of the adjudication of validity-claims is to be
conjoined with particularistic considerations of moral value. The
adoption of these (non-transcendental or 'situated') principles
encourages the 'continuation of ordinary moral conversation, in
which we seek to come to terms with and appreciate the other's
point of view'. Michael Walzer disputes this, asserting that any
ethical position which relies on a 'constructed philosophical
conversation' (including Habermas but also such American neoliberals as Rawls and Bruce Ackerman) hypostatises idealised
speech at the expense of 'real talk'. It is only through the medium
of such real talk, he argues, that substantive debate can be
engaged in. Such a dialogue can only be constrained by conventional factors operating within particular forms of life, and therefore a genuinely free dialogue can never be subject to the
arbitrary dictates of an a priori conversational design, whatever
the emancipatory intent: 'Real talk is unstable and restless,
hence it is ultimately more radical than ideal speech. ' In her brief
reply to Walzer's article, Georgia Warnke makes the valuable
point that the later Habermas abandons the hyper-rationalist
model of the 'ideal speech situation' and instead adheres to the
notion that the procedural assessment of validity-claims is 'built
into' the very structure of pragmatic communicative action itself. Although Warnke suggests that this invalidates the central
thrust ofWalzer's argument, she does concur that some conception of 'real talk' must be retained in a discourse-based ethics if
we want to ensure 'the rationality of our political discourse
without eliminating the diverse perspectives that make it possible'. (In a separate piece, interestingly enough, Warnke defends
Walzer's pluralist theory of justice against the criticisms of
47
Rorty and others.) In his contribution, Habennas criticises the
psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg for utilizing the concept of
'ideal role taking' or empathic reversal as the main basis for
developing a moral point of view. Such a position fails to
acknowledge that individual well-being ultimately depends
upon the integrity of the 'shared life context': 'the perspective
complementing that of equal treatment of individuals is not
benevolence but solidarity.' Reiterating Wamke's argument,
Habennas asserts that the barriers to the realisation of such
solidarity (and the universal morality it implies) can only be
dissolved by recourse to 'the conditions of symmetry and the
expectations of reciprocity characteristic of every ordinary communicative practice' .
Another debate centres on the question of universalisability
in tenns of political 'will fonnation' rather than communicative
ethics as such. Carol C. Gould argues that universalisability (or
some analogous conception of a 'common interest') is possible,
but that Habennas's restriction of universality to the dialogical
model is untenable. What is needed, in her opinion, is a conception of shared interest which is grounded in the fonns of practical, shared activity that occur in all domains of social life. The
critical theorist Albrecht Wellmer also defends a modified version of universalism with respect to the ideal of communal
freedom. His position is that the 'positive' communal freedoms
espoused by radical critics of capitalism must be premised upon
'negative' individual freedoms enshrined in liberty rights. The
latter must be continually 'translated' into the fonner in order to
realise a genuine ethical life, but there will always be some
tension between them. To believe in some ultimate reconciliation between communal and individual freedoms is for Wellmer
'utopian' in the pejorative sense: 'The end of utopia ... should be
understood as modernity entering its postmetaphysical stage.'
Agnes HelIer argues against rooting an ethical theory in some
abstract conception of universality or shared membership, asserting that all we can have in common in the modem world is a
situation of radical contingency. The desire to live an ethical life
cannot be based upon a priori principles; goodness can only be
realised through difficult existential choices on a daily basis
whereby we translate contingency into 'destiny'.
Two essays focus on the differences between Habennas and
Alasdair MacIntyre on the issue of 'tradition' and its relation to
critique. Both figures see philosophical ethics as both historically-situated and critical. However, for Habennas this is rooted
in the universalised 'nonnativity' of modernity, while for
MacIntyre it is 'internal' to the nonns and practices of a particular tradition (which doesn't preclude the possibility of intercultural dialogue). This internal rationality, according to
MacIntyre, emerges in the wake of moral crises that tend to
develop within any given tradition, combined with the enhanced
reflexivity this situation encourages. Michael Kelly envisages a
significant rapprochement between their respective approaches,
but only if Habennas abandons the desire to 'discover the tradition-transparent ground of moral principles'. MacIntyre, for his
part, is admonished to accept that rationality within a tradition is
never 'guaranteed' but is only possible if such a tradition actively strives to resolve rather than simply tolerate moral dilemmas and social conflict. By contrast, Kenneth Baynes rejects
MacIntyre's account of the rationality of tradition and defends
Habennas's attempt to combine interpretive henneneutics and
causal analysis in a higher synthesis. This is a goal that
Habennas has pursued for most of his career, but Baynes' s essay
is useful because it charts some of Habennas' s more recent
refonnulations of this strategy and places it in the context of a
wider debate about the means and ends of rationality.
The remaining contributions fall outside the rubric of these
48
central debates, but remain of considerable interest nonetheless.
In a highly provocative essay, Adi Ophir challenges the standard
view that a henneneutic ethics should be based on the principle
of the just distribution of goods, arguing instead that social
criticism must aim to decipher and analyse the distribution of
evil. Some evils cannot be avoided, and some can be converted
into a socially-defined good (by voluntary suffering, etc.), but in
a just society 'all socially preventable suffering is prevented'.
The converse is a situation of 'radical evil' (e.g. Nazi Gennany),
in which the principle of 'convertibility' is not the outcome of
discursive negotiation but is eliminated altogether. Thomas
McCarthy's 'Politics of the Ineffable' launches a devastating
attack on the currently-fashionable 'politics of deconstruction'.
Astutely characterising the essentials of deconstructionism' s
philosophico-political programme, he convincingly argues that
by abandoning any notion of 'positive critique' (which, as he is
keen to stress, does not necessarily entail foundationalism),
Derrida and his followers have embraced a version of 'politics'
that is incoherent at best and downright pernicious at worst.
Finally, Rudolf Makkreel attempts to derive a theory of critical
interpretation from Kant's third Critique with the goal of reflexively mediating between the three spheres of the aesthetic, the
teleological and the moral.
Generally written with verve and precision, the essays that
comprise Hermeneutics and Critical Theory represent a highly
successful attempt to bring together three distinct intellectual
traditions - contemporary henneneutics, post-Frankfurt School
critical theory, and Anglo-American political theory - in order to
rethink the character of ethico-political critique and its relation
to existing debates over rationality, modernity, and philosophical reflection. Given the sophistication of these contributions
and the urgency of the task of developing a genuinely democratic
and participatory politics in these 'postmetaphysical' times, this
volume deserves widespread attention and careful scrutiny by
philosophers, social and political theorists alike.
Michael Gardiner
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
FRICTION
STRUCTURATIONS
Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, translated by Sarah Wykes,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. ix + 196pp., £29.50 hb, 07456
0627 x.
Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary (eds), Giddens' Theory
of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation, London and New
York, Routledge, 1991. 252pp., £12.99 pb, 0415007976.
Freud and Fiction brings together four essays originally published between 1969 and 1974 and revised for publication in
book form in 1974. Kofman reads Freud reading Empedocles,
Jensen's Gradiva, Hebbel's ludith and Holofernes and
Hoffman's The Sandman. Her preface 'On the Analytical
Novel', added in 1974, reads Aristotle's reading of the preSocratics in order to emphasise the philosophy-psychoanalysis
crossover by examining a text 'paradigmatic of all philosophical
interpretation'. The outcome is as predictable as that of most
paradigms: 'Aristotle's metaphors constitute a secondary text
within the text which undermines its authority and its seriousness by introducing an element of play into it.' In short,
Kofman's readings are largely restatements of a
deconstructionist vulgate which repetition is beginning to render
wearisome. She reads with subtlety and erudition, carefully
tracing the possible parallels between Empedocles' s dualism
and Freud's later theory of the drives and examining in exhausting detail fictional texts which clearly mean a great deal to
Freud. Ultimately, however, the sophistication palls and one is
left with a dismal feeling of deja-lu. The detailed readings begin
to look like theoretical myopia rather than insight. References to
the privileging of writing over speech, to the endless
supplementarity of writing and to letters which are meant to be
read even if they do not reach their destinees, begin to look like
the tropes of a rather tired rhetoric. The one thing that cannot be
deconstructed, it would appear, is the foundational authority of
Derrida, whose name is confined to footnotes but whose presence is palpable throughout.
Freud and Fiction belongs with the 'theory as fiction' discourse which has established enclaves within literary and philosophical studies. Psychoanalysis is the privileged locus for this
discourse. Perhaps it is also the privileged victim. This is a
psychoanalysis which has become disembodied, in which the
only affect is the satisfaction of completing a particularly complex word game. Freud was naive enough to believe that psychoanalysis had at least something to do with transforming
neurotic misery into ordinary human unhappiness. He was
clearly wrong; its true destiny was to become part of an aesthetic-philosophical discourse which is at home in the seminar
room but not the consulting room. Kofman alleges, inevitably,
that Freud's texts lead to the deconstruction of metaphysics. In
this and similar readings they lead, rather, to the reconstruction
of a precious mannerism.
Yet some traditional vices survive: characters 'experience'
and authors 'intend' meanings. No doubt such notations can be
read as a subversive blurring of the real-fictional divide, but they
can also be seen as stubborn survivals of a form of literary
criticism which was commonly supposed to have died out with
formalism. On the basis of the arguments put forward here, one
reading is as valid as the other.
The translator copes well, if at times rather literally, with a
difficult text. The only real problem is one of a slight
misrecognition. Freud wrote, or Kofman has him write, le roman
analytique. If this ambiguous term is translated as 'novel' rather
than 'romance', the important allusion to Freud's paper on
'Family Romances' is unfortunately obscured.
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge,
Polity, 1990. xi + 186pp., £9.95, 0 745609236.
David Macey
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
I
1-
Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory, Cambridge, Polity,
1990. 192pp., £29.95 hb, 0 745 607403.
Anthony Giddens is a phenomenon. His published writings have
grown over a decade and a half into an 'oeuvre' - voluminous,
all-embracing, erudite, suggestive, pregnant with possibilities.
He stands at the confluence of some major streams of modem
social thought: Marxism, Critical Theory, Structural-Functionalism, Symbolic-interactionism, trying to identify some place
for free human agency in social change. Marxist sociologists
look on sceptically as, volume by volume, his Contemporary
Critique of Historical Materialism rolls out. Others wonder how
to apply his social theorising to empirical or historical material,
and why he hasn't done so himself. Expressions like
'Giddensiana' and 'the Giddens industry' have surfaced to try to
make out the terrain he is traversing.
It is natural to look to Bryant and Jary's collection for help
and guidance. On an exegetic level, they provide it. Much useful
work has gone into the book, which takes as the core of
Giddens's thought his ontology of 'structuration': the process
whereby human action at specific points of the social structure
amends that structure while reproducing it. There are thorough,
if rather stodgy, analyses of the theory and of its roots in both
Europe and North America, with numerous summaries of the
comments of others to help the reader into the luxuriant corpus of
Giddens's own work. There is a comprehensive bibliography of
that work and of writings about it. There is critical commentary
from a group of theoretically inclined British academic sociologists: Ron Boyne, Richard Kilminster, John Urry and the editors
themselves. To end, Giddens contributes a prospective on his
own work.
Most of the writers are admirers rather than critics of
Giddens. (The exception is Ron Boyne, who accuses Giddens of
'blatant Cartesianism' - 'strong language', he claims - for retaining the notion of a 'knowledgeable social actor'). Yet, it is
striking that the writers' overall tone is one of disappointment.
Giddens advanced an optimistic view of the emancipatory affinity between social theory and lay social actors: 'There is no
mechanism of social organisation or social reproduction identified by social analysts,' he wrote in The Constitution of Society
(1984), 'which lay actors cannot also get to know about and
actively incorporate into what they do. ' Yet, these writers find
little confirmation of the optimism. As Bryant points out, even
social-policy analysts greeted Giddens's overtures (in his
'dialogical model' of sociology) with suspicion. Far from realising the early hopes, Urry argues that Giddens's accounts of
human structuring activity have cashed out in a concentration of
agency in the state. According to J ary, when Giddens substituted
the 'time-space distanciation' of historically given societies for
all teleological, evolutionary models of historical development,
he may have excluded numerous illuminating, untried historical
possibilities. Finally, for Kilminster, the structurating agent remains suspiciously close to the rational one who is traditional in
sociological theory, eliding the complex of lived bonds by which
human beings inhabit their understanding of the social world.
49
11
I
r!
11
I
i
In his compact survey of the 'past, present and future' of
structuration theory, Giddens himself rises breezily above the
criticisms. What is fundamental in structuration, he insists, is not
society and the individual (agent or otherwise), but recurrent
social practices. The Enlightenment itself grasped the reflexive
historicity of modem social existence. So, the self had become' a
reflexive project' long before post-modernism prematurely proclaimed the abolition of the determinate subject and the arrival of
a new age. Giddens's project is precisely to show (despite
Habermas's fears of colonisation by expert systems) the 'many
opportunities for individual and collective organisation' which
reflexivity offers. For this he promises us the 'utopian realism'
of the forthcoming volume of the Contemporary Critique.
Post-modernism is a primary intellectual target of Giddens's
thoughtful and readable essay on The Consequences of Modernity. It defends a 'radicalised modernity', in which the fragmentation of subjectivity and historical truth are countered by new
possibilities for reflexive identity and empowerment. In setting
this out, Giddens rehearses, in uncomplicated language, the
features of modernity expounded in his other works: the
'disembedding' (and 're-embedding') of social practices; the
high levels of risk and trust which that generates; the self as a
reflexive project.
In a section resembling a trailer for future work, Giddens
also explores his conception of utopian realism. Even though it
dispenses with teleological guarantees about the future, it retains, he argues, the Marxian principle of pursuing only those
avenues for change that are connected to 'institutionally immanent possibilities'. The very abstractness of modem systems
dissolves the old dichotomy between real and utopian goals. For,
we now live with the risks of vast, perpetually open systems,
where utopian ideals may be advocated, provided they are tempered by realism. In this way, Giddens believes that we can
attempt to steer the 'juggernaut' of modernity, even if we cannot
seize hold of any unitary, teleological history.
The doubters in the Bryant and Jary collection repeat criticisms which have been often levelled against Giddens' s theorising on the human agent. Some favour a deconstructive
dissolution of the human subject altogether, or a switch from
logical to 'sociogenetic' procedures to define the human subject
afresh. But the theoretical alternatives advanced by Giddens and
his critics leave considerable philosophical doubts. The basic
problem seems to lie in what Giddens calls 'ontology'. By this he
means the 'investigation of the nature of human action, social
institutions and the interrelations between action and institutions'. According to Giddens, human action - and hence, its
'ontology', in his sociological sense - has undergone a crucial
historical transformation. As modernity increased interaction
between humans who were physically separated from each
other, social practices were, in Giddens' s term, increasingly
'disembedded' from the everyday experience of the agent.
Structuration could then take place on a new plane of reality,
where there was wider scope for social practices to be modified
in their repetition. Agents became more free in that sense; but
their freedom appears to be profoundly ambiguous. It also became harder to own one's social practices and easier to impose
them from above. Giddens' s account of human action still has to
illuminate the ontological grounds which could make this kind
of historical transformation of human agency an emancipatory
one.
Giddens closes his prospective with a summary of some
current research using structuration theory. Had it appeared at
the time, he could well have included Adam's short, lively book.
It is dedicated to Giddens for 'making time a legitimate topic of
investigation for social theory'. This is a reference to Giddens' s
50
concept of 'space-time distanciation', the process by which
social practices construct and maintain zones that share the same
time and space. According to Adam, one of the virtues of spacetime distanciation is that - unusually amongst social theories - it
has assimilated Einstein's fusion of space and time.
However, Adam wants to go much further. She directs her
argument against the tendency amongst social theorists to regard
all time as social time. This, she claims, rests on an out-dated
Newtonian-Cartesian conception that takes natural time (and the
causality associated with it) to be sequential and absolute. More
advanced concepts of rhythm and entropy so qualify the contrast
between natural and social time that a new synthesis has now
become possible. Events that are repeated, or are acausally
contemporaneous, can be shown to be compatible with the unidirectionality of natural time. Adam proposes that the experience
of time is a special case of universal principles of time found
throughout nature. Since both are embraced in the same orders of
time, a link can be made between human experience and the
material artefacts that are its indispensable real referent. Yet,
Adam admits to struggling for an adequate conceptual apparatus
to embrace this way of thinking. She settles provisionally upon
holography, with its distinctive conceptions of the relationship
of whole to parts. The central difficulty appears to be the representational dimension of human insertion into time: the seeming
inability to shape and re-shape past and future in imagination.
The hardest terrain to map remains the modem sense of the
possibility of transformation within historical time.
Noel Parker
IMAGINATIONALITY
E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1990. viii + 191pp., £5.95 pb, 0 521 40678 1.
Hobsbawm opens his enquiry into the question of nationalism by
postulating the bemusement of an imaginary post-Apocalypse
intergalactic historian trying to reach an understanding of nationalism in human history. But such a scenario seems rather
superfluous, given the work-a-day confusion about the nature of
nationalism which the contemporary observer of world events
could readily be forgiven. Neil Ascherson, writing in The Observer, expresses the current confusion in terms of nationalism's
Janus face; one side being the old-style nationalism, right-wing,
brother of patriotism and protector of long-held interests, the
other the expression of peoples' power, encapsulating
liberationist aspirations for self-determination.
Hobsbawm's book goes some way to clearing up this confusion, providing a history of the concepts of nations and nationalism from their beginnings to the present. In so doing, he
uncovers two distinct phases of nationalism, that of the liberal
era, approximately 1830-1880, and a second, transformed form,
under whose banner any group of people considering themselves
to be a nation claim the right to self-determination. Hobsbawm
brings out the distinctiveness of these two different creatures
posing under the same name, showing how, in the heyday of
bourgeois liberalism, the building of nations was seen as a
process of expansion, the idea of 'nation as progress' being
regarded as part of mankind's natural evolution. From the practice of these beliefs, he elicits three criteria for nationhood: the
historic association with a current or recent state, the existence of
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
a long-established cultural elite, and the proven capacity for
conquest. Nationalism at this time, then, considered as a unifying force, accepted and even embraced the idea that smaller
nationalities and their languages were ultimately doomed to
extinction.
To late twentieth-century ears, these ideas seem a long way
from the later cries for self-determination in the name of ethnicity, language, religion and culture with which we are now so
familiar. Hobsbawm traces the shift to the second, more recognisable form of nationalism, locating its principal characteristic
as being national sentiment ground in popular roots. In the
course of this, he highlights rather than fudges difficult issues
such as our inevitable ignorance of the contents of the ordinary
political soul, and the precise factor constituting proto-nationalism, and this honesty allows him to make revelatory comments
which run counter to the now conventional wisdom about national aspirations. Notable are the observations on the relative
unimportance of language and ethnicity to the question of nationhood in its infancy and the lasting centrality of an 'imagined
community' in popular consciousness.
On this level, perhaps the book's main virtue lies in its
charting of the changing notions of nation and nationalism according to their social and political context, thus historicising the
notion itself. In this way, it provides an accessible history of a
very potent idea, illuminating the relation between both of nationalism's faces. But, at the same time, it makes something of a
frustrating read, as some of the more interesting comments are
not as fully developed as they might be and would merit a deeper
discussion. The most prominent of these is Hobsbawm's conclusion about nationalism's place at the end of the twentieth century, into which his interpretation of liberationist nationalism i.n
the third world must be read. While his attribution of theIr
existence to decolonization, revolution and the intervention of
outside powers may in some measure be correct, and his pointing
up of their aims as fundamentally internationalist trenchant, the
dismissiveness of his analysis gives rather short shrift to the
genuine aspirations of those movements. This is perhaps explicable in terms of his opening declaration that a wnter who
documents nationalism cannot be true to his subject while nurturing a belief in it. But his suspiciousness leads to a conclusion
ringing with Ultimacy: 'Nationalism, however powerful the
emotion of being in an "imagined community", is nothing without the creation of nation-states, and a world of such states,
fitting the present ethnic-linguistic criteria of nationali!y , is not a
feasible prospect today.' At a time when struggles for mdependence in the name of nationalism, for whatever motive, are not
only proliferating but also winning out, such an appraisal seems
somewhat precipitate; perhaps this phenomenon indicates rather
a third face of nationalism.
Alex Klaushofer
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
ETHICAL
KNOWLEDGE?
Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with
Science, London, Routledge, 1991. 206pp., £35.00 hb, 0 415
033993.
Tom Sorell is concerned to reassess philosophy's view of the
relationship between the arts and sciences in such a way as to
rectify the undervaluation of the former without seeking to
disparage the latter. He identifies two forms of 'scientism' - the
belief that science and its methods are more valuable than those
of the arts and humanities - in the history of philosophy: the
relatively old form, whose antecedents are the writings of Bacon,
Galileo and Descartes, and whose twentieth-century adherents
are typified by the Vienna Circle; and a more recent form, which
seeks to 'naturalise' philosophical problems - for example, by
relocating ethics in biology, epistemology in empirical psychology, and the philosophy of mind in neuroscience. Sorell suggests
that a more balanced approach occurs in the philosophy of Kant,
in which the arts and sciences are both valued insofar as they
contribute to human moral improvement. He thus updates
Snow's disquisition on the competing 'two cultures' and asserts
that a rapprochement between the two is possible in Kantian
terms.
Sorell introduces the concept of scientism by explicating the
programme conceived by the Vienna Circle and like-minded
theorists for the 'unity of science'. By this, they meant the
application of the methods of the natural sciences to the social
sciences, humanities and arts in order to place them on a supposedly more scientific footing. He traces these excesses to the
views of Bacon and Descartes. In his central chapter on Kant,
Sorell gives an exemplarily lucid account of that philosopher's
views. However, he does not make clear whether he shares
Kant's theory of ethics, nor whether he subscribes to Kant's
'moral law' (the idea that individuals can rationally expect to be
rewarded for their virtue) and its metaphysical corollaries (the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul). For if he does
not, and if it is not possible to arrive at ethical truths, then how
can one evaluate the respective contributions of the arts and
sciences to human moral improvement in the way that Sorell
hopes Kant's theory will? If Kant's project is misguided, then
perhaps there can be no 'correct' view of the relationship between the arts and sciences.
This seems to me to present an irremediable difficulty for
Sorell's theory. In the following chapter, he considers heterogeneous moral criticisms of the arts and sciences which might
demonstrate that they are somehow built on morally bad foundations and so cannot contribute to human improvement - for
example, the view that science might make us indolent by improving the efficiency of our work, or that it puts life into a
'distressing perspective' by discrediting religious teleologies.
He surmises that 'if there is a body of knowledge that tells people
the difference between right and wrong and that strengthens their
resolve to do only the right, it is the sort of knowledge that is
required if science is not to be misused'. But what is this knowledge? Who has it and how did they come by it? If we tak.e
Sorell's 'moral objections' to science as examples of the genre, It
is easy to show their relativity: indolence is a moral defect only
insofar as one subscribes to some form of work-ethic; the discrediting of teleology only matters if one accepts a religious
world-view. He considers Nietzsche's critique of the moral
evaluation of culture and makes a peculiar remark to the effect
51
that anthropological study might reveal 'substantial agreement'
between differing moralities. It is hard to see how there might be
'substantial agreement' between monogamy and polygamy, for
instance, or between our own values and the Aztec practice of
human sacrifice - hard, too, to understand why the history of
humanity is marked by continuous conflict between nations,
classes, races and religious groupings if there is in fact some
underlying moral consensus.
Sorrell argues that the adversarial view of the relation between science and art can be overcome when human improvement is the criterion of evaluation. He sees philosophy as a
mediating influence which may help to diminish the perceived
disjunction between them. He is critical of what he thinks is a
more recent form of scientism in philosophy, which seeks to
absorb philosophy into science, and makes a cogent critique of
this tendency. In the final chapter of his well-written andextraordinarily catholic analysis, Sorrell protests against the attempt to
assimilate ethics and the social sciences to natural science by
'naturalising' value - he suggests that 'it is an unpromising
approach to social science as it is to morals' . All this is extremely
interesting. But if the attempt to reduce the normative to the
natural fails, this does not necessarily increase the likelihood of
ethical knowledge which is non-naturalistic.
Gary Kitchen
IN THE SHADOWS
Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (eds), The Enlightenment
and its Shadows, London and New York, Routledge, 1990. viii +
232pp., £35.00 hb, 041504231 3.
The editors of The Enlightenment and its Shadows claim that its
essays present original research .from an interdisciplinary perspective, concentrating 'on the written texts of the Enlightenment rather than retelling a more general history of ideas'.
(Although several of the essays make good this claim, sharing
the sense of 'discovery' which can arise from textual archaeology and analysis, too many of them seek their material in the
penumbra cast by the textual research of other scholars.) The
essays cover a diverse range of issues: Voltaire, Rousseau,
Ferguson, Burke, Kant, Mercier's utopian novel L' An 2440,
music, sexual politics in France, human rights since 1789, the
authoritarian response to the Enlightenment in the nineteenth
century. The shared basic premise is that, although twentiethcentury readers can no longer bask in the optimism of the
Enlightenment, its 'shadows have played a complex role in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century society'. These' shadows' are
generated by the way Enlightenment thought was formed and
informed by historical interests even as it presented its basic
assumptions as transcending history.
Hulme's 'The Spontaneous Hand of Nature: Savagery, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment' demonstrates the link between
colonial exploration and Enlightenment philosophy by tracing
the way metaphors of discovery shaped the attitude of early
Enlightenment texts towards traditional authority. Hulme sets
the tone for all the essays in this collection by attempting to
'reinstate the Enlightenment discussion of "savagery" into a
colonial history, ... trying to see just how [it] formed part of an
extended ideological justification for colonial appropriation of
non-European territories, particularly in the Americas'. The
Powhatan attempt to extirpate the English colony at Jamestown
in March 1622 provided an opportunity to refigure the native
Americans as more like animals than noble savages. Hulme
speculates that English perceptions of this event influenced a
range of seventeenth-century texts, including Hobbes' s account
ofthe state of nature in Leviathan (1651). The intriguing, and for
his contemporary readers disturbing, aspect of Hobbes' s text,
however, is that the distinction between European 'civilization'
and native American 'savagery' is complicated by his suggestion that the European would not differ much from 'the wildest
of Indians' if all the benefits of civilization were removed. In
other words, 'the "savage" Americans become for the first time
identical in their deepest nature with their European antagonists.
52
In this way savagery is lodged disconcertingly close to the crust
of civilization'.
At least two of the essays in The Shadows of the Enlightenment explicitly foreground their own historical moment and
political sympathies (and thereby become 'historical' in the
sense of already seeming dated). Ted Benton' s 'Adam Ferguson
and the Enterprise Culture' sets out too refute Thatcherism' s
misappropriation of Adam Smith as a philosophical forerunner
(surely one of the Enlightenment's most umbrageous shadows),
and uses Ferguson' s critique of Britain's developing commercial
society in the eighteenth century as the basis of a critique of
Thatcherism. Ferguson's rejection of 'luxury' in favour of 'the
active exercise of our faculties' is characteristic of the eighteenth-century concern that 'a high development of the
mechanical and commercial arts' carries with it 'attendant dangers of corruption, national ruin, and despotism, or political
slavery'. For critics such as Smith and Ferguson, these dangers
arise partly because the nature of the occupations which fall to
the majority of the labouring classes in the division of labour
tends to render them unfit to take an active part in social and
political life. Ferguson' s concern - and Benton makes it seem
our own - is that 'a self-interested and preoccupied citizenry'
will be 'incapable and unwilling to make sacrifices in defence of
their liberties', and so be 'liable to lose them'. At the level of
state policy, the value system of commercial society tends to
concern itself 'only with preserving the security and property ...
of the citizenry, without regard to the promotion of their higher
faculties and virtues'. Ferguson' s description of the strategy of
the person who controls the executive power in such a society is
implicitly offered as a salutary warning to Britain in 1990:
When he has fixed a resolution, whoever reasons or
demonstrates against it is an enemy; when his mind is
elated, whoever pretends to eminence, and is disposed to
act for himself, is a rival. He would leave no dignity in
the state, but what is dependent upon himself; no active
power, but what carries the expression of his momentary
pleasure .... The tendency of his administration is to quiet
every restless spirit, and to assume every function of
government to himself.
Benton argues that Ferguson' s critique can be reinterpreted as
suggesting that' a healthy and vital labour movement is a necessary condition for substantive democracy in the advanced commercial states'. He is disturbed, however, by the 'masculine even militarist - cast to Ferguson' s concept of the virtuous life.
... He frequently uses the word "effeminate" to characterise a
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
L
life-style corrupted by luxury and withdrawal from the exertion
of public life'. Yet I would suggest that Ferguson' s Essay on the
History of Civil Society needs to be read not only for its contemporary 'relevance', but in terms of its place in the discursive
formations of mid eighteenth-century Britain. In this context, the
figuration of luxury and virtue as feminine and masculine respectively is not an unfortunate aberration but a shaping assumption, with a complex history of meanings, in the discourse of
politics and economics. Although these eighteenth-century discourses can be said to construct versions of our contemporary
understandings of gender distinctions, the historical specificity
of Ferguson's project, and its differences from our own concerns, also needs to be recognised. As well as encouraging us to
find continuities between the present and the past - as
Thatcherism itself sought to - we need to remain alert to the way
historical differences challenge as well as confirm our
understandings of the present.
David Musselwhite's 'Reflections on Burke's Reflections,
1790-1990' is a provocative re-reading of Burke's texts which
seeks to 'present a Burke who speaks to us now in 1990 - that is,
to an audience, to a public even, bemused and disturbed by the
political phenomenon of "Thatcherism", . The editors' preface to
Musselwhite's essay seeks to dramatise its historical moment:
'Given Margaret Thatcher's less than glowing assessment of the
French Revolution, delivered with matchless insensitivity during her visit to Paris in July 1989, it would no doubt come as an
unwelcome shock to her to read how Burke - father of conservatism - had castigated the Revolutionary Assembly precisely for
its Thatcherite economic policies'. In a curious way, then, Mrs
Thatcher becomes the implied or intended reader of this essay
(of this book?) and Burke's attack on the age of 'sophists,
oeconomists, and calculators' is offered as a salutary lesson for a
British prime minister (and/or the British public) two hundred
years on. Indeed, Thatcher becomes the Enlightenment's most
terrifying shadow as Musselwhite identifies the 'unformed spectre' which Burke claimed to dimly apprehend in the French
Revolution not with communism (as Conor Cruise O'Brien
does) but with the unbridled capitalism which eventually
achieved its historical embodiment in Thatcherism. This is
Burke in the first of the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796):
out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has
arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far
more terrifying guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of
man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by
peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she
could at all exist. ... The poison of other states is the food
of the new Republic. That bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned for the fall
of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened
her traffic with the world.
This is Musselwhite:
this monstrous female personification of the Revolution
must remind us of none other than Mrs Thatcher herself:
the remorseless determination, the pitilessness ... , the
unnaturalness. That sentence, 'The poison of other states
is the food of the new Republic' - which for Burke was
metaphorical, has become astonishingly literal in the
context of a country offering itself as an unregulated
dump for toxic waste, while his perception that bankruptcy has become the very principle of international
finance is all too accurate an account of the current
hysterical ebb and flow of hot capital through the City
driven by a monstrous balance of payment deficit.
Burke's nightmare is upon us.
It seems difficult to differentiate the hysteria from the history
here. This passage seems to encapsulate the way Thatcher's
spectre 'overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude'
of a large sector of the intellectual Left in Britain in the 1980s.
Why, though, the emphasis on hysteria in the first place, and why
link Burke's spectre with Thatcher on the basis that both are
female?
Although these questions cannot be adequately discussed
without a thorough analysis of the gendering of politics, economics, and aesthetics in the eighteenth century (Benton' s essay
on Ferguson takes a hesitant step in that direction), Margaret
Iversen's 'Imagining the Republic: the Sign and Sexual politics
in France' reminds us that the protagonists of the Revolution
represented their own projects and principles in gendered terms.
In place of the ancien regime's implicitly 'feminine' public
spectacles such as the masquerade, Iversen reminds us that
Rousseau imagined, and the revolutionaries sought to institute,
'a completely different kind of festival that would unite citizens
without making them spectators'. Yet this is complicated by the
revolutionary government's need to exploit the power of images
in order to influence 'the people'. Iversen draws on Mona
Ozouf's suggestion that the revolutionaries opted for' allegory ...
as a solution to the problem, for allegory is allusion rather than
illusion', and avoids 'the slipperiness of the simulacrum by
heightening the conventionality of the image'. The choice of an
allegorical female figure as an image for the new seal of the
Republic by the National Convention of 1792 not only alluded to
the Catholic tradition of female saints, but found its theoretical
underpinning in Rousseau' s notion of sexual difference - in
which the ideal of transparency was reserved for men, while
'women in the Republic should wear a veil of pudeur or modesty
in order to excite male initiative that would spill over into the
public domain'. This strategy of representing Reason or Liberty
as female gelled with available political meanings of the feminine and so enabled counter-revolutionaries to attack the Republic as a whore (or a terrifying female spectre).
Tom Furniss
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
53
DIALECTICS
J. D. Hunley, The Life and Thought of Frederick Engels: A
Reinterpretation, New Haven and London, Yale University
Press, 1991. xiii + 184pp., £14.00 hb, 0 300 049234.
Engels has here found an unlikely defender in the US Air Force,
where Hunley holds the post of Deputy Command Historian.
Needless to say, he hastens to declare 'I am in no sense a
Marxist' . In spite of his evident regard for Engels, the axe he has
to grind is scholarly, not political.
Engels's fame rests largely on his role in defending and
popularising Marx. The need for 'reinterpretation' arises because Hunley objects to what he sees as a new orthodoxy, which
he calls 'the dichotomist portrait': this opposes Engels's views to
those of Marx in some fundamental way. The bulk of the book is
an intervention in this debate. Hunley argues strongly that
Engels did not disagree with Marx about important issues and
did not distort Marx's views after the latter's death.
In the first two chapters, on Engels' s life, Hunley makes
clear his admiration for 'the most learned man in Europe' , a man
who knew twenty-six languages. Hunley especially praises
Engels's grasp of military strategy and his far-seeing analyses of
international relations. Unfortunately, Hunley's book was in
press before he became acquainted with the biography of the
leading Engels scholar, Terrell Carver (Friedrich Engels: His
Life and Thought, 1989). Hunley simply notes that he disagrees
with Carver's emphasis on the influence on the adult Engels of
his original Young Hegelianism. But there are some striking
continuities: for example, as early as 1843 Engels claimed that
'the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to
Hegel, must end in Communism'; and this is the same belief that
lies behind his testament of 1886 that 'the German working-class
movement is the inheritor of German Classical philosophy' .
The third chapter reviews the' dichotomist' literature, dating
from 1961 with Lichtheim' s influential book on Marxism, and
going on through Tucker, Schmidt, Averini, N. Levine, Jordan,
Carver, Bender, and Kain. As Hunley is aware, the odd feature of
this literature is that the authors disagree amongst themselves on
the substantive issues involved; although it is always Marx who
is the good guy, and Engels the villain. Thus an author with a
taste for dialectic will praise Marx' s dialectical subtlety, while
condemning Engels for his positivism; conversely, an author
with a distaste for dialectic will attribute this aspect of Marxism
to Engels's metaphysical inclinations, and rescue the sober scientist Marx from its baleful shadow.
The remaining chapters of the book refute the dichotomist
portrait. Hunley's approach consists largely of 'quote-throwing'; but this is enough for his purposes. However, he makes
things easy for himself by concentrating on the following areas:
appearance and reality; reformism and revisionism; humanism
and science. He has no difficulty demonstrating that any problems in these areas were shared by both writers.
In my view the most awkward issue is whether or not we can
saddle Marx with 'dialectical materialism' as we have come to
know and hate it. This philosophical outlook derives from
Engels's Anti-Diihring. Hunley should have gone into this more
thoroughly. Of course, he stresses that Marx sent Engels some
material on political economy for the book, and never dissociated himself from it.
Perhaps Marx, being old and ill, did not consider it worthwhile to question his old friend's achievement. If that is so, then
we need to take all the more seriously Carver's claim (in Marx
and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, 1983) that these
views are foreshadowed in any essay Marx would have taken a
54
close interest in, namely Engels' s review of Das Volk of his 1859
Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy - a precursor of
the first part of Capital. Carver exaggerates grossly: indeed,
Engels here warns against exactly that procedure he will himself
adopt in Anti-Diihring; the Hegelians, he says, 'appropriated
only the most simple devises from the master's dialectics and
applied them to anything and everything, often moreover with
ludicrous clumsiness' .
Marx was closely involved with Das Volk at that time, and
pushed Engels to do the review. Submitting the first part to
Marx, Engels specifically advised him that he could 'tear it up',
or 'dress it up' , if he did not like it. Thus it seems that the review
had Marx's imprimatur. Yet an extraordinary thing about the
review is that, without much evidence from the book, Engels
situates Marx' s work in the context of German philosophy, and
more particularly Hegelian speculative science; he goes on to
foist on the book a 'logical-historical' method. Three puzzles
arise: (a) was it useful to drag in Hegel? (b) was Marx's method
'logical-historical '? (c) if either of these are to be answered in the
negative, why did Marx allow the review to pass (and exult when
it was widely reprinted)?
(a) Carver holds that the tradition of approaching Marx's work
through Hegel was first established in Engels' s review. Of
course, Marx himself adhered to this tradition in the second
edition of Capital, in so doing appropriating from the review
the metaphor of a rational 'kernel' in 'idealistic wrapping',
where Hegelian logic is concerned. But why did Engels
bring in Hegel in 1859? Apart from his own views (mentioned above), Engels had the evidence of a letter from Marx
(14 January 1858) in which it is noted that Hegel's Logic was
of assistance in 'the method of analysis'. I conclude that
Engels was entitled to refer to Hegel.
(b) In his review Engels tried to restore Hegel' s reputation by
pointing to his 'tremendous historical sense'. Engels was
thereby led to make the fateful step of inventing a method of
exposition which, while 'logical', is yet 'nothing but the
historical method, only stripped of ... disturbing fortuities'.
This flatly contradicts Marx's explicit statement in his draft
'Introduction' of 1857 (presumably unknown to Engels) that
the categories should not be presented in order of historical
evolution, but in accordance with the articulation of the
existing system. (Furthermore, Engels' s view cannot properly be ascribed to Hegelianism; for Hegel in his systematic
dialectics, such as The Philosophy of Right (see para. 32 and
Add.), is at one with Marx.) However, Engels did have on
file an extremely confusing outline by Marx of his project
(letter of 2 April 1858), in which he spoke of transitions
which are 'also historical'.
(c) I think Marx let the review pass because he was still undecided on the issue. Indeed, if one considers the basic valueforms, then the sequence commodity-money--capital could
be both logical and historical; each cannot be understood
without its predecessors, with luck the concept of each could
be derived from its predecessor through a dialectical development, and historical contingencies did indeed make this
progression possible. (The book Engels reviewed dealt with
commodities and money only, remember.)
Hunley considers all this' a minor point'! But it is very important
for assessing the value of dialectical method; and it has generated much debate in recent years. In the end, of course, the really
important issues are the substantive ones, and not whether, and
upon what, Marx and Engels agreed.
Chris Arthur
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
THAT GUY
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, translated by Malcolm Imrie, London, Verso, 1990. 94pp., £24.95 hb,
086091 3023, £8.95 pb, 0 86091 5204.
Mike Gane, Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, London and
New York, Routledge, 1991. 243pp., £35.00 hb, 0415037743,
£10.99 pb, 0415 03775 1.
It is rumoured that Baudrillard and Debord used to hang out
together, young bohemians in post-war Paris anticipating tastes
later inscribed in their writings; one preferred the brothel while
the other liked to drink. Only a rumour, but a nice commentary
on the common beginnings and interlocking histories of these
two writers.
In their early years, Baudrillard and Debord shared an intellectual project as well. Baudrillard's 1960s writings have much
in common with Debord' s situationist critiques of consumer
society, and even his attachment to the notion of symbolic
exchange retained some connection with the situationist milieu.
Not until his recent discourse on postmodernity does it appear
that Baudrillard has departed from Debord' s world of spectacle,
situation, production, and image. Cutting the critical ground
from beneath Debord's feet, Baudrillard's world is that of the
hyperreal, the obscene, seduction, and simulacra; terms which
are used to develop a theory fatal to the beautiful souls who still
believe in the meaningful and/or the real. Certainly he has been
the more successful of the two, if academic and media stardom is
anything to go by: while Debord devoted himself first to
Internationale Situationniste and then to paranoid obscurity,
Baudrillard pursued a career which has lately found him at a
postmodern vantage point from which situationist writings seem
like letters from afar. But his writings are soaked in nostalgia and
loss, his critiques are coming from nowhere. Debord may be
abandoned, isolated, and even misguided - legal wrangles
plague new editions and translations of his work; French reviewers welcomed the first volume of his autobiography, Panegyric,
in tones reserved for interesting, but minor, eccentrics - but his
writing retains a forceful energy which at least suggests that he
has something to say.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle can be read in
fascinating tandem with many of Baudrillard' s more recent
writings; intelligent and succinct, it does in fact express much of
what Baudrillard has spread across several re-hashed texts.
Debord's book is a commentary both on his 1967 The Society of
the Spectacle and on what he still wants to define as spectacular
society itself: a world in which the increasing confusion of
appearance and reality conspires to preclude the possibility of
critical negation. And this is indeed a conspiratorial text: invoking a world of intrigue, surveillance, secrecy, disinformation and
purposeless communication, Debord rails against the dominion
of the image and fumes at the simulacrum. He still speaks the
language ofthe situationist project, of course: in part, Comments
is a vindication of his earlier critiques of advanced capitalism as
a closed and spectacular version of itself. All that happened in
the frozen history of the last twenty years, he insists, was an
exacerbation of the disengagement and emptiness which characterise advanced capitalism. Debord cannot be optimistic about
his observations. But, peppered with veiled threats of instability
and appeals to those for whom the spectacle is both visible and
vulnerable, the book retains Debord' s mischievous arrogance.
The philosophical position he occupies may well be untenable,
the negation of which he continues to dream may well be a
nightmare. But Comments is more than an anachronism: beautiRadical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
fully crafted, well translated, and conjuring its own obscure
notoriety, it is a provocative and intriguing text. Debord says
nothing new, but few writers are in a position to claim otherwise.
Least of all Baudrillard.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle does not find its
way into Mike Gane's Critical and Fatal Theory. But Gane does
pick up on the earlier connections between Debord and
Baudrillard. In a discussion of Baudrillard's 'essential background and context', Gane gives 'Saint Guy' a place in an
intellectual canon which includes Saints Roland, Julia, Louis,
and (surely Pope?) Jean-Paul. Extending this contextualisation
beyond the 'saints' of the Parisian intelligentsia to figures like
Marcuse and Durkheim as well, Gane refuses to accept the
ahistorical and free-floating impression which Baudrillard's
work so often gives. This ability to situate Baudrillard enables
Gane to develop an engaging account of the interests and arguments which run through Baudrillard' s work. Keen to stress
Baudrillard's distance from the postmodernism with which he
has been associated, Gane presents him as a critic, rather than a
protagonist, of the postmodern condition, and identifies a 'coherent and stable framework' at work throughout his writing.
Symbolic exchange, he argues, remained the guiding principle
of Baudrillard' s thought long after it appeared to have left the
scene: it is always against symbolic exchange that Baudrillard
measures the superficialities of Western culture. This would
certainly explain the nostalgic regret which suffuses
Baudrillard's recent writings, and here again, Gane is to be
commended for his refusal to take Baudrillard at face value, his
ability to see the melancholia that comes free with Baudrillard' s
ecstasy, and the traps which his work inevitably sets for itself.
Organising Baudrillard's entire opus around the principle of
symbolic exchange, however, Gane often finds himself defending Baudrillard' s own failure to recognise the basis of his own
position. One consequence of this, clear in Gane' s rather equivocal discussions of Baudrillard' s relation with feminism, is that he
sometimes has little to write beyond descriptive accounts of
Baudrillard's positions and those of his critics.
Though not the most elegant of writers, Gane presents a
well-constructed text and offers a very different Baudrillard
from the one we are used to consuming. His 'Saint Jean' is a
rigorous critic, not at all a thinker who attempts to subvert and
displace the critical function itself. This is a sociologist's
Baudrillard, whose writings take the fatal form of a commentary
on Western culture in order to be critical in their content. Such an
account requires rather more substantiation than it receives in
this book, but Critical and Fatal Theory nevertheless provides a
welcome antidote to more superficial and selective readings of
B audrillard' s work.
Sadie Plant
55
FREE SCHOOL
Nigel Wright, Assessing Radical Education: a Critical Review
of the Radical Movement in English Schooling 1960-1980,
Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989, xii + 244pp.,
£9.99 pb, 0 335 09228 4.
Nigel Wright, Free School: the White Lion Experience, Bristol,
Libertarian Education, 1989. xi + 73pp., £3.95, 0 9513997 1 3.
In passing, Nigel Wright criticises Radical Philosophy for its
comparative uninterest in educational matters as well as its
retention of the formalism, technicality and the sheer difficulty of
philosophic discourse. The central and unacknowledged theme
of his timely and admirable book is the contradiction between
what for Yeats was 'the fascination of what's difficult' -let us
call this the necessity of theory - and popular education's no less
necessary commitment to plain speaking in the real language of
men as well as, since 1968, the real and other language of
women.
The contradiction - the twistpoint - is of course a longstanding topic for debate among the intelligentsia, as well as for
quarrelling and bloody mayhem among the groupuscules, as
Wright well knows. And in the first place, his book is less an
assessment (a word with disagreeable resonances today) than a
historical rollcall, honoris causa. He provides a potted history of
those many minority and generally short-lived movements for
radical education which were his own honoured formation,
which gave educational life in the years (roughly) of 1965 to
1975 its colour, noise and optimism, and which added their
glowing residue to the deposits of radicalism in the culture, a
source of energy to future generations, now ignored, some time
to be tapped.
Given this history and its pieties, one can only be grateful;
but even given the fact that Wright was composing his book
before the Fall of the Wall, there is an unnerving lack of recognition on his part of just how sclerotic a state socialism itself was in
at that moment, and how downright silly the much-initialled
arguments of the sects had seemed to teachers and children alike
since long before that date.
He partly sees this problem, although he never brings out its
centrally geographical feature, that all the radical activity he
describes was overwhelmingly based in London, and rarely got
beyond it. I would also guess from his tone that he is in the usual
position of Left-polemical writers in Britain of writing with a
keen eye on a special audience who will only applaud if their
sharp ears are satisfied by his political correctness.
This being so, Wright has brought off a neat turn of balancing. He tells off many of the groups for their errors - for
unrealism of political aims here, for sentimentalising of children
there, very properly chastening A. S. Neill himself for selfcontradiction on the way - but hangs on to his generous sense
that it is radical (rather than socialist) progressivism which, still,
is most likely to water the desert lands of the modem comprehensive schoolin Britain.
He can't do everything. He says little about the difficulties
brought on themselves by the multi-culturalists, who so conspicuously can't decide as between the freedoms of classical
liberalism and the claims of black identity where these may well
include the antique and hateful absolutes of fundamental Islam.
He might similarly have been sterner on his friends at the
Children's Book Bulletin for assortedly ridiculous sanctimonies
about sexism in Arthur Ransome or Mark Twain.
But, keeping to a conversational idiom and a calmly egalitar-
56
ian stance, he succeeds in each of the three parts of his book: a
short history of radical groups; a sympathetic critique of radical
pedagogy; lastly, an earnest commendation of the radical project
which, apart from the odd lapse into platform hortation, is
soundly practical, especially as it counsels praxis.
Wright keeps his and our courage up. In these dark times for
all those loyal to the standards of a sufficient welfare state, that is
a victory. But it is, I must add, still so intellectually dismaying
that he lets go by with a mild reproof the sheer antiintellectuality, the offhand and philistine way with culture, the
downright stupidity about the art of the possible, of so much
purportedly radical education. In doing so, he also misses so
much that might have stiffened his thesis and raised his spirits.
He misses the radicalism of subjects with a mere note on English
teaching and Teaching London Kids: nothing about NATE and
the radical critique so many teachers of English took and take
from the origins of their subject, and took moreover into teacher
training colleges at a time when the status of the job was turned
up several notches into an all-graduate profession.
It's tough to carp, when he has done so much work, and done
it by himself as well. Perhaps what his book lacks is brought out
by his little monograph on the White Lion School. It reads
painfully like a recent M.Ed. thesis, solemnly footnoted and
sprinkled with on-the-spot interviewing. Why couldn't he have
told it as the rattling good yam it so definitely was? And then, in
turn, why couldn't he have assessed radical education sweepingly and sharply, taking in the whole of that full field, books,
professors, experimental curricula, free schools and all? He has
the grasp and the gifts; goodness knows, we need the book.
Fred Inglis
AFTER ADORN·O
Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity. Adorno and
Benjamin, London, Routledge, 1991. xi + 220pp., £9.99 pb,
041506029 X.
David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after
Adorno, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ix +
249pp., £19.99 hb, 0 8032 3897 5.
These two books, the first of which has been recently reissued in
paperback, promise to make a substantial contribution to the
ongoing debate on modernity and the post-modem. David
Roberts's book on Adorno' s aesthetic theory focuses on the
latter's analysis, in The Philosophy of Modern Music, of the
breakdown in traditional musical forms, a process that constitutes a microcosm of the wider problems of art and Modernity.
Roberts offers a thorough, if occasionally dense, account of
Adorno's interpretation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Schoenberg is seen as the authentic artist of modernity, pursuing
the dialectic of total rationalisation to its logical endpoint of
absolute indifference in his turn first to atonality, then to twelvetone music. In contrast, Stravinsky gains Adorno's opprobrium
for merely 'tinkering around' with the disparate fragments of the
tradition, resulting in meaningless pastiche and the complete
liquidation of subjectivity. Adorno's analysis is important for
Roberts because it suggests that the distinction between modem
and post-modem is not so much a distinction between two
periods, as Lyotard or Jameson would have it, but rather descriptive of. two alternative responses to the death of tradition accom-
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
panying the advent of Modernity. From the evidence of
Stravinsky's work alone, Roberts insists that the characterisation
of post-modern art as pastiche, as schizophrenic, applies equally
to artworks from the '20s onwards as well as to contemporary
ones.
So is Roberts attempting to assimilate post-modernism to the
project of modernity? Not exactly, since he is also anxious to
indicate the flaws in Adorno's dialectic of modern art. Throughout Adorno's account it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between progress, i.e. Schoenberg as the authentic artist
pursuing the rationalisation [subjectification] of musical language to its limit, and decadence, i.e. the fact that, following
Adorno's understanding, authentic modern art 'lies at the limit of
progress' . Adorno' s inability (or reluctance) to recognise that the
dialectic of progress becomes its own undoing in Schoenberg' s
dissolution of musical language and tradition indicates the considerable limitations which accompany his dialectic of the modern. This weakness explains, too, Adorno' s critique of
Stravinsky's 'post-modernism', which can only give it a negative value. Yet, as Roberts points out, the ghost of Adorno has
yet to be exorcised, since it inhabits accounts of the post-modern
by B iirger as well as J ameson, Eagleton and others, who are
forced to define the post-modern in negative terms. Instead,
Roberts argues, we need a paradigm change, one which can
escape the grasp of the dialectic and allow a recognition of the
contingency of the artistic tradition and 'of all social formations'. If we take this into account, Roberts maintains, we need
not dismiss the post-modern appropriation of past forms as mere
'pastiche' but as an authentic attempt to confront that death of
tradition which is the hallmark of modernity.
Where Roberts' s book does leave one somewhat puzzled is
firstly in his contention that Adorno's Aesthetic Theory adds
very little to the substance of the essays on music, and second in
his curious reading of Brecht as the authentic post-modern
dramatist. Regarding the latter, Roberts is aware of the tension
between Brecht' s commitment to scientific Marxism and the
putative elements of contingency in his drama, such as epic
form, 'Verfremdung' and so forth, but fails to really get to grips
with this problem. However, that notwithstanding, Roberts's
book still offers much food for thought.
A more appropriate title for the collection of papers edited by
Andrew Benjamin would perhaps have been 'The Problems of
Post-modernity', since many ofthe essays included demonstrate
the danger in neatly separating modern and post-modern (increasingly equated with post-structuralism), indicating the many
problems in much 'post-modern' thought. For example, the
essays by Joanna Hodge and Janet Wolff emphasise the considerable similarities between the two in their treatment of the
feminine. Wolff reminds us that WaIter Benjamin's description
of modernity is a peculiarly masculine one. Noting the increasing nineteenth-century division between 'male' public life, and
'female' private life, she observes how the fragmented experience of the flaneur is largely a male preserve, and the description
of modernity largely the description of men's experience of
modern life. Similarly Joanna Hodge observes that, while postmodern or post-structuralist theorising should be assimilating
the work of feminism, both liberal and radical, it tends to perpetuate the exclusion of the feminine. The 'canon' of poststructuralist thinkers tend to consist almost exclusively of men
such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, while those such
as Kristeva, Montrelay, Cixous or Irigaray are still seen as
'other', the feminine as the 'beyond' of representation. In the
question of the feminine the division modernism/post-modernism misleads us by masking common difficulties in overcoming
certain forms of marginalisation.
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
Turning to the issue of subjectivity, Peter Dews' essay on the
critique of identity uses Adorno' s work to examine the problems
inherent in the post-structuralist dissolution of subjectivity.
Dews points out the suspicion of 'identity thinking' shared by
Adorno and post-structuralism, then mobilises Adorno's dialectic of identity and non-identity to form a critique of the contemporary affirmation of the purely non-identical, whether it be
differance or Lyotard's libidinal band. As Dews notes, if we
simply discard the identical, we fail to understand the tension at
the heart of subjectivity, in effect avoiding some of the more
important issues concerning the constitution of selfhood.
A review of this length cannot do justice to all of the essays
assembled here. Suffice it to say that this collection, together
with David Roberts's book, are a timely reminder of the significance of Adorno' s work. His thinking occupies a position assimilable neither to the post-modernism of Lyotard or Deleuze,
nor to Habermas' s or Wellmer' s praise of modernity, one which
either side in the debate ignore at their peril.
Matthew Rampley
ON LIMITS
David Wood, Philosophy at the Limit, London, Unwin Hyman,
1990. 162pp., £25.00 hb, 004445625 5, £8.95 pb, 004445624
7.
The position taken by David Wood in this book is that philosophy is constantly regenerated by its own sceptical resources, 'an
everlasting fire' which feeds itself in consuming its own heart. In
order to keep its concerns burning, it must be both passionate (or
fiery) and vigilant, continually examining its limits as it exceeds
them.
Wood finds this self-critical practice most pronounced in
thinkers in the 'Continental' camp, which for him takes in
Wittgenstein, Hegel, Derrida, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and
Gadamer. He does not suggest that Continental philosophy has
the monopoly on 'healthy' scepticism, but that its versions of the
sceptical attitude are more productive for philosophy as selfregenerative. This is because these thinkers are more concerned
with the question of strategy in philosophy, a scepticism about
their own methodology and means of engaging in philosophy.
For Wood, this question 'both allows and forces us to rethink the question of ends, of beginnings, of margins, of limits,
thresholds - the very space of philosophy. There is no thinking
of limits which does not deploy a certain model of space'. The
dominant model is that of 'a simple and continuous dividing line
on a two-dimensional surface', responsible for the representational and conceptual divisions of inner and outer, presence and
absence, and other dualistic distinctions. Wood identifies three
challenges to this model. The first is from mathematics and
physics (the Kleinian bottle and black holes being two examples
which unsettle fixed boundaries in space). The second is in the
experience of the body as 'a site of boundary ambiguity', its
orifices and dimensions being neither inner nor outer (a conception explored in Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy). The final
challenge is the way that language acts to undermine its own
sanctity through equivocal meanings (metaphor and irony, for
example). It is this challenge which Wood takes up.
The issue of limits in philosophy then becomes one of topography or topology. The limits or boundaries to philosophical
enquiry can be expanded to take in philosophy's responsibility to
57
its practical implications, or act as a reminder of its own limitations in relation to other disciplines. Either way, the description
and re-description of these boundaries is crucial, and must involve language or 'style'. But this point depends on a conception
of language as self-critical, which is the real theme of the book.
Wood traces versions of language-subversive methodologies
through various thinkers, arranged in a somewhat haphazard
fashion (Derrida, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Derrida and
Gadamer), but Derrida is always the reference point.
For Wood, there are two main advantages to this analysis.
First, it should help the philosophical discipline to guard against
developing an inflated sense of its own importance and presuming to legislate or pronounce on every topic with authority. This
'unlimited' version of philosophy is challenged by historical
shifts and transformations, and by the fact that philosophy has to
be practised in 'more or less messy languages' rather than a pure
logical space. As Wood points out, attempts to translate philosophical thinking into a pure or formal language run the risk of
producing pure or formal solutions.
The second advantage is that it should encourage practitioners of philosophy to be critically vigilant about the relation of
philosophical theory to the community in which it takes place,
asking how philosophy can become more answerable to the
practical implementation of its philosophical ideals of community.
The two dangers to philosophy are thus seen as abstraction
into universality and an accompanying irrelevance to more particular practical concerns. In this context perhaps one of the
more provoking chapters deals with the debate (or non-debate)
between Gadamer and Derrida on the possibility of dialogue, a
possibility which must be the crux of the disputes between
hermeneutics and deconstruction. Gadamer's attempt to engage
in an 'open' debate about the political and ethical future of
philosophical communication and community is problematised
by Derrida's 'refusal' to take openness and communicability for
granted. But does this refusal just amount to a deferral of discussion on the part of Derrida, which is also a kind of deafness? For
Wood, Gadamer's trust in communication makes certain assumptions. Derrida remains sceptical about the extent to which
'otherness' or difference of the other is ethically compromised
by these assumptions.
David Wood writes in an admirably lucid style, all the more
admirable when the topic is style itself. To avoid oversimplification on the one hand, and the pitfalls of infinite regress or the
exuberant excesses of sub-Derridean critics on the other, requires a sure-handed philosopher. Wood demonstrates his commitment to elucidation and accessibility without lessening the
significance of the issues involved. But he is drawn to question
his own approach in the final pages of the book. He asks
whether, in attempting to 'vindicate a certain species of difficulty in philosophy', he is not merely engaged in presenting 'a
kind of domesticating analytical translation of all that is of
lasting value to Continental philosophy'. However, since the
stated aim of the series in which his book appears, 'Problems of
Modem European Thought', is to present Anglo-American studies with issues, concepts, texts and authors which may be unfamiliar to them, a certain amount of translation seems inevitable.
If the regenerative possibilities of philosophy do indeed lie with
a constant restlessness as to its topics and methodologies, in
conjunction with a desire to make it relevant, popular and political, Wood's book counts as a solid contribution to these concerns.
Alison Ainley
58
RECONNECTIONS
David McLellan and Sean Sayers, eds, Socialism and Democracy, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1991. viii + 181pp.,
£35.00 hb, 0 333 54555 3, £14.99 pb, 0 333 53556 1.
Contributors to this useful collection unite in a twofold conviction. The first is that democracy is today, more than ever, a
central issue for the Left; the second, that 'socialist ideas about
democracy now require the most fundamental and radical reassessment' (Sayers). The spectacular decline of Stalinism in the
East resonates through the pages of the book as, indeed, does the
rather less dramatic retreat of social democracy in the West. For
Gamble the meaning of both is clear. No longer, he argues, can
the relationship between socialism and democracy be taken as
axiomatic; the connection between them 'has to be demonstrated'. All of the writers here seem keen to re-establish it. Not
merely should socialists make their peace with 'liberal' advocacy of political pluralism and civil liberties, most authors agree,
they should actively appropriate and champion these ideals.
Only if they do so might they hope plausibly to find a language in
common with the anti-communist revolutionaries of the East.
While critical of the liberal democratic status quo, some writers,
like Keane and Claeys, warn against what they perceive as
unrealistic attempts to 'perfect' democracy or society more generally. Other contributors, like Rustin, Wainwright and
Showstack Sassoon, continue to search for a more radical reading of traditional liberal commitments.
An encouraging feature of this book is its willingness - in
informative contributions by Sakwa and Ferdinand - directly to
reckon with the nightmarish legacy of 'actually existing socialism' in the USSR and China respectively, as well as (in articles
by Claeys and Whitemore) with British socialism's own, decidedly mixed, historical record.
.
This collection offers a great deal of persuasive diagnosis of
socialism's current dilemmas - Gamble is admirably relentless
in this regard - but rather less by way of formulas for its
rejuvenation. This imbalance is, as Whitemore reminds us in the
case of Britain, consistent with a long standing reluctance
amongst socialists to imagine the details of a future order. Of the
contributors who do flesh out some of those details, Michael
Rustin and Hilary Wainwright offer the most distinctive and
interesting accounts. Rustin makes a plausible case for extending rights of citizenship from the political to the economic and
social realms, specifying some of the concrete mechanisms
through which this might be accomplished. Wainwright addresses thoughtfully the ways in which Left governments in
power· might relate to autonomous social movements and vice
versa, mobilising their 'different sources of power' without
compromising the latter's independence. In the process she hints
at a radicalisation of the currently fashionable 'civil society'
theme.
The book's overall uncertainty (if not quite pessimism)
about possible socialist futures is understandable in the aftermath of 1989. But that does not quite explain the disappointingly
sparse and conservative contribution of John Keane, a writer
who has elsewhere published much that is important and salutary. His anxiety not to 'foist the principle of direct democracy
on to representative institutions' seems alarmist when judged
against the several known instances - recall, referenda and
popular initiative at state and local level in the US, town hall
meetings in New England, referenda in Switzerland, to name a
few - where the 'principle of direct democracy' coexists comfortably with quite conventional representative institutions.
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
These direct-democratic techniques and structures are not
unproblematic, and representative democracy enjoys some
genuine advantages which they do not: but their existence ap~ears to pose little threat to the integrity of the wider representatIve framework, and might in important ways enrich it.
Likewise, Keane declines to demonstrate his case that it is public
economic ownership as such - as opposed to more plausible
candidates like the monopolistic party state, the absence of
independent trade unions and a commandist theory of economic
management - which exposes citizens to the 'whims and calculations' of those who simultaneously perform the functions of
'policeman, administrator, social worker and employer'. (Private e~ployers too can fire union activists or employ blacklists,
and theIr record on tolerating dissent is not as a rule better than
that of civil service or local council employers or managers of
nationalised industries.)
I am also unpersuaded by Anne Showstack Sassoon's fresh
statement here of the now widespread notion that universalistic
principles of political equality are hostile to the' difference' she
wishes to celebrate, or to intervention by women and minorities
in the public realm, or indeed to programmes of affirmative
action to redress past inequalities and meet special needs.
Though not a position I share, this is one that can be plausibly
defended. The problem with Showstack Sassoon' s piece is that
she fails to identify the actual connections through which an
apparently empowering discourse comes to exclude and disable
a section of its subjects. Without such detail her piece is left
stranded at far too high a level of generality.
It may be that both Keane and Showstack Sassoon suffer
from having to make highly compressed arguments, leaving too
much to interesting but contentious claims which in a more
spacious book they might have had room to substantiate. The
obverse of this book's undoubted and commendable accessibility is its (sometimes frustrating) littleness.
Daryl Glaser
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
FOUCAULTIN
FLIGHT
James w. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight, New
Jersey and London, Humanities Press International, 1990. xii +
261 pp., 0 391 03635 1.
Bernauer borrows his title from a little-known essay by Foucault
on a series of paintings by the French artist Paul Rebeyrolle.
These powerful mixed-media works depict a dog's escape from
a confined space. In the final canvas, the greys and whites give
way to a vibrant blue as the prison wall cracks. Foucault commen~s: 'In the struggle of men, nothing great is achieved by way
of wmdows but everything is always achieved in the triumphant
c?llapse of walls.' For .Bernauer the essay and the paintings it
dIscusses are emblematIc of the passion that inspires Foucault's
work: the constant denunciation of all forms of imprisonment or
confinement and the exhilaration of escape.
Foucault has often been read as though his work were a series
of fragments, with critics concentrating on specific texts or
'periods' . That approach no doubt reflects the seemingly deliberate avoidance of systematicity, the refusal to be defined as either
philosopher or historian, and the sudden turns on the slalom run
that took Foucault from the baroque splendours of Madness and
Civilisation to the austerity of the final volumes of the unfinished
History of Sexuality. For Bernauer, it is precisely the relentless
quest~oning (and self-questioning), the movement of flight itself,
that gIves Foucault' s writings their coherence and passion. Their
consistency is not to be found at the level of theme or discourse
but in the demand for an ethics. Thought itself becomes a form of
action which must be interrogated as the source of the knowledge that informs and deforms political action, and the individual's relationship to the self.
. .
Bernauer takes as his corpus virtually all of Foucault's writings, the only significant text not to be discussed being Le
Desordre des families, the anthology of eighteenth-century letters requesting the confinement of deranged, debauched or
criminal husband, wives, children and neighbours coauthored
with Arlette Farge in 1982 but never translated into English.
Despite that omission, this must be the most complete survey of
Foucault's immense output. The simple tactic of analysing such
a wide corpus in the chronological order of its production gives
some su~rises. The Order of Things gained notoriety for its
proclamatIOn of the death of man, but a very similar formulation
can be found in the last lines of the study of Kant that was
submitted, together with Madness and Civilization, for a doctorate in 1961. In the face of such evidence it becomes increasingly impossible to view even the Foucault of 1966 as a
'structuralist' or 'technocratic' anti-humanist.
Although Bernauer provides exemplary readings of the well~own archaeological and genealogical texts, his major strength
IS the exploration of less familiar areas. He gives a particularly
impressive reading of the early work on psychology - subsequently disowned by Foucault himself - which usefully complem~nts the recent and rather different work of Gutting in his
Mzchel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason and
Forrester in his Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Foucault's attempt to co~bine or reconcile Binswanger and Pavlov ends,
perhaps predIctably, in failure. This time, it is a wall of humanism and positivism that collapses. Foucault' s liberation is traced
through the group of essays and reviews published in the early
1960s (on and of authors such as Klossowki, Blanchot, Bataille,
Roussel and Laporte), which certainly deserve to be better
59
known. They are seen here as providing the means of escape
from the epistemological prison of the project for an anthropological psychology by opening up an infinite space of possibility
in which language speaks without end. Language becomes the
material element for the emergence of the human and the foundations of anthropology are shaken to the ground.
The identification of an ethical strand in Foucault enables
Bernauer to read the final volumes of The History of Sexuality
not as a collapse into narcissistic solipsism, but as the exploration of the modem experience of the self that manifests the free,
ethical activity of thought, as a form of love and self-love that
can resist and survive in a culture that has lost its way. It also
helps him to read Foucault's involvement with a variety of
political projects not as a voluntarism, but as an ethical protest
against the intolerable, to use the generic title of the pamphlets
produced by the Groupe d'lnformation sur les Prisons.
Bernauer is not merely an exemplary reader. He is also a
textual archaeologist who carefully unearths the confused and
Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the
Capitalist State in its Place, Cambridge,
Polity, 1990. xii + 413pp., £39.50 hb,
0745602894, £12.95 pb, 0745602908.
Bob Jessop was one of the first generation
of British state theorists on the Left, making judicious applications of Marxist and
structuralist accounts of the state - particularly with ideas drawn from Nicos
Poulantzas. With the notable exception of
his
analysis
of
Thatcherism
(Thatcherism: a Tale of Two Nations,
1988), much of his output has been academic. This volume collects together his
best articles and critiques over the last
decade and a half. Jessop and his editors
have done their best (with introductory
material, detailed index, and analytical
contents list) to counter the drawbacks
inherent in such collections. The book
may prove handy for the student who
wants a quick critical account of any significant recent line of thought - from Corporatism to Regulation Theory. But it
remains primarily something for aficionados of the sociological theory of the state.
Jessop has confronted, absorbed and
built upon a number of the currents which
have appeared in state theory since he
began writing in the 1970s - most of them
hostile to Marxism. Following its
Leninist-Althusserian phase, Marxist
state theory has had to weather the attacks
of 'state-centred' theories, the advance of
systems theory, the (possibly enfeebling)
embrace of discourse theory, and poststructuralist attempts on the entire logic it
deployed to analyse social and political
conflict. But Jessop attempts to salvage a
viable marxist position from these many
challenges. Without attributing to the
'capitalist' state either a single logic, a
global strategy or the power of a unified
60
lacunary history of the final texts. He succeeds in placing
Foucault in context by reading, for example, Discipline and
Punish against the background of its author's involvement in
political struggles in and around prisons, The Archaeology of
Knowledge against the Annales historians' transformation of
documents into monuments, Foucault's fore grounding of historical discontinuities against the scientific epistemology of
Canguilhem. Two appendices, finally, chart the differences between the two editions of Mental Illness and Birth of the Clinic.
Foucault is a biographer's nightmare. Bernauer provides a
feast of a biography - the most comprehensive available to date
in any language, though there are inevitably some minor omissions. It will remain indispensable until the French edition of
Foucault's hitherto uncollected writings, announced but repeatedly delayed, finally appears. For non-Francophone readers, its
importance will obviously not be diminished by that event.
subject, he manages to define it in terms
of the social processes it tends to sustain.
His is a 'strategic-theoretical' perspective, in which (extending the work of
Poulantzas and Gramsci) the state is seen
fundamentally as a site of the interplay of
strategies. It is the cluster of institutions
where the paradoxes inherent in directing
and
holding
society
together
('societalization') are brought acutely
into conflict.
Jessop is able to absorb into that theoretical setting many of the gains from the
rival positions that he examines. While
not conceding systems theories' overall
vision of entirely autonomous systems,
for example, he can identify various social sub-systems that are 'structurally' or
'strategically coupled' through the points
where they interact. Again, while countering discourse theory's sweeping dissolution of both state and society, he has
learnt from it to think of the state as 'fluid
inter-discursive space' against which
Marxism and the Left can still direct their
efforts.
Noel Parker
David Macey
J. Claude Evans, Strategies of
Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth
of the Voice Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1991. xxiii + 205 pp.,
$39.95 hb, $14.95 pb., 0 81661925 5 hb.,
o8166 1926 3 pb.
If your hackles are raised by the selfindulgence of some of Derrida' s more
recent essays - by what is solemnly
termed their 'ludic' quality - you are
likely to be directed to the more conventional works which he published in the
1960s. 'When he wants to De, Derrida can
be as scrupulous in his scholarship and as
rigorous in his argumentation as anyone,'
you will be told, in rather the way that
sceptics about 'modem art' used to be
rebuked by the observation that Picasso
started off by being brilliantly skilful in
academic drawing. Derrida' s dense work
on Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, in
particular, is commonly regarded (even
by those who have not read it) as a subtle
demonstration that Husserlian phenomenology, and perhaps everything else in
Western philosophy, is a symptom of
'logocentric' obsession which is in turn
based on 'phonocentrism', or the myth
that meaning can be gathered directly
from the personal experience of a 'living
vocal medium'. J. Claude Evans confronts this orthodoxy head on. He works
his way patiently through each chapter of
Speech and Phenomena, showing how
violently Derrida has had to twist and
dismember Husserl' s writings in order to
present them as celebrations of 'the excellence of the voice'. If Evans is right,
this interpretation is no more than a projection of Derrida's preconceived and
reductive - not to say logocentric - concept of phonocentrism. After dealing,
much more briefly but no less convincRadical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
ingly, with Derrida's treatment of Aristotle and Saussure, Evans concludes that
Derrida's early writings as a whole, with
all their claims to rigour, 'overwhelmingly fail to live up to their own standards'. It is a 'discouraging' result, as
Evans admits, but it makes for an important and necessary book.
Jonathan Ree
Penelope J. Corfield, ed., Language,
History and Class, Oxford, Blackwell,
1991. viii + 320pp., £39.95 hb, 0 631
16732 3, £11.95 pb, 0 63116733 1.
Here is an attempt to chart the relationship between historiography and linguistics, and to apply this to a case of the
language of social distinction and domination, the language of class, estate and
degree, and of power. The first task is
fulfilled by the first and last essays. P. J.
Corfield's text, written for historians, is a
competent account of the state of the art
within the structuralist problematic that
seemed particularly urgent in the '70s,
when linguistics was seen as the model
for all the social sciences to imitate: what
conceptual tools can historians borrow
from linguistics? William Downes envisages the converse question (how can the
linguist deal with the peculiarities of the
historian's pragmatic position?) from the
more recent point of view of discourse
linguistics and philosophy of language:
he analyses the hermeneutic paradoxes of
historiography in the light of Putnam,
Grice and the concept of relevance
(Sperber and Wilson), and applies his
findings to the case study of Paul
Robeson's appearance before the Committee on Un-American Activities - and it
appears that the intentional theory of
meaning cannot adequately capture the
intricacies of meaning and understanding
of historical documents. The intervening
essays, written by historians, account for
the constitution of the semantic field of
class in Great Britain (Tudor and Stuart
England, eighteenth-century Britain and
the Victorian period), with an extension
to the range of the study to other European countries (Spain, France and Germany), and to other continents (India,
China, the US). Perhaps because it was
more exotic to me, I found David
Washbrook's analysis of the penetration
of and adaptation to the European ideologies of language in the Raj particularly
compelling. Even if this collection does
not really bring new light on the theoretical relationships between the two fields, it
is excellently conceived and executed
and, a rare thing in such cases, it reads as a
single text, not a medley of discordant
tunes.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992
Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the
Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and
Lyotard, Durham and London, Duke
University Press, 1991. ix + 170pp.,
£28.50 hb, 0 8223 1075 9, £13.95 pb,
08223 10937.
Writing on the postmodern appears to be
going through a curious bout of nostalgia
as iconoclasm begins to look for its ancestors. In a series of sympathetic readings of
the triumvirate of his title, Pefanis identifies Bataille as the key mediator in the
constitution of the problematic of
postmodern philosophy. Bataille, the
theorist of excess and of a general
economy based upon the destructive consumption of surplus, is at last beginning to
emerge as a key figure, but behind him
there are other key figures, notably
Kojeve, whose studies of Hegel influenced a whole generation from Queneau
to Lacan. Behind Bataille stands the
shade of Mauss and his theory of the gift,
but behind Mauss stands the figure of
Durkheim and the 'total social fact'. In his
inaugural lecture at the College de
France, Foucault speculated that the
whole of modem thought might be no
more than an attempt to escape Hegel,
adding that it was quite possible that
Hegel had outwitted us once more and
that we might find him waiting for us,
immobile and already elsewhere. Hegel
might not be the only ghost lying in wait
for us. The ghosts in question are probably more familiar in France than on this
side of the Channel, and Pefanis does well
to conjure them up.
The readings offered here are patient
and cogent. Pefanis ranges from Clastres
on sacrifice and violence to the
Situationists, and provides sympathetic
but not uncritical examinations of
Lyotard and Baudrillard. He is cagey
about claiming Bataille as a precursor of
the postmodern, being anxious to avoid
'the mistakes of modernism in the construction of a revised pantheon of universal values', but in fact demonstrates the
case very convincingly. He does rather
more than continue the narration of the
heterodoxical tradition in French thought
(his stated ambition), and succeeds in locating it in its political and cultural context. Pefanis also displays, perhaps
unwittingly or unwillingly, some very
pre-postmodernist virtues. When he
speculates that Lyotard's 'crisis of the
meta-narratives' can be seen as Lyotard's
own loss of political faith and his own
crisis with the meta-narratives of Freud
and Marx, he is probably right. But he is
also coming very close to a very traditional author-based history of ideas.
Sadly he misses the irony of Lyotard's
position: the story of his or our incredulity
at 'Great Narratives' has surely become a
great narrative in its own right.
Pefanis writes engagingly and wittily,
but the plethoric use of prefixes like 'pre, and 'post-' does become irritating. Not
the least of the text's attractions is that
Pefanis, like Baudrillard in his lighter and
more convincing moments, at last gives
space to Jarry. For all its distrust of seriousness and its insistence on play, the
postmodern is all too often too serious for
its own good (Baudrillard's lugubriously
ponderous Cool Memories being a case in
point). Bored and sceptical theorists
could do worse than revive Jarry's putative 'pataphysics' or science of imaginary
solutions. Heterology and the
Postmodern appears in a new series entitled 'Post-Contemporary Interventions'.
Somewhere, Jarry's Dr Faustroll must be
laughing. Born at the age of 63 in 1898,
when the twentieth century was minus
two years old, he was obviously always
destined to be the patron saint of the postcontemporary.
David Macey
Alien W. Wood, Hegel's Political
Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. xxi + 293pp., £30.00
hb, 0 521 37432 4, £10.95 pb, 0 521
37782 X.
Since its very beginnings with Russell
and Moore, analytical philosophy has
generally regarded Hegel as the paradigm
of error and illusion in philosophy. What,
then, is a respectable analytical philosopher like Wood doing writing a book on
the man? Wood wastes no time in allaying any suspicion that he has succumbed
to Hegelian temptation. 'Speculative
logic is dead', we are told at the outset:
Hegel's dialectical approach is nothing
more than an 'utterly unconvincing'
mishmash of 'shallow sophistries' (p. 4).
After this inauspicious start, however,
Wood has gone on to write a remarkably
good book. Its topic is, as its title indicates, Hegel' s ethical thought. It gives an
excellent-clear, scholarly, useful and, on
the whole, reliable - account of Hegel's
central ideas in this area. The main focus
is on Hegel's Philosophy of Right;
though, where necessary, a full account is
given of Hegel's other works. Hegel is
portrayed as advocating a distinctive ethic
of 'self-actualization' which cannot be assimilated either to more familiar
deontological or teleological approaches
in ethics. Wood shows how the P hilosophy of Right presents a series of 'images'
61
of the development of freedom and selfconsciousness, in which the human agent
conceives of itself 'successively, ever
more concretely and adequately, first as a
"person" possessing abstract rights, then
as a 'subject' with a moral vocation, then
in the concrete spheres of ethical life as a
family member, burgher, and finally as a
citizen' (p. 32).
The book contains detailed and informative accounts of Hegel's views on
freedom, rights, property, punishment
and 'ethical life' (Sittlichkeit). Perhaps
one should not ask for more. As it turns
out, the rejection of dialectic is less damaging than one might think; and yet, inevitably, there is a cost. In characteristic
analytical style, Wood tends to treat
Hegel's ethical thought as a series of independent and separate doctrines on various issues. What is abandoned with
dialectic is the systematic interconnections that Hegel sees between them - his
attempt to unify his ethical ideas into a
larger systematic whole. Indeed, the very
subject of Wood's book illustrates this.
For in Hegel' s work, morality and ethics
are only the initial parts of the larger
whole treated in the Philosophy of Right.
Wood's account takes us only up to the
stage of 'ethical life', and stops short of
the discussion of the State and political
institutions with which the Philosophy of
Right culminates.
Perhaps, as Wood asserts, the systematic and speculative side of Hegel's
thought is in many respects flawed and
untenable. However, that is surely an issue which needs to be investigated and
discussed in any fully adequate treatment
of Hegel' s philosophy. If Wood is too
quick to dismiss Hegel' s dialectic, his
treatment of Hegel 's ethical ideas suffers
at times from the opposite fault. Wood
often confines himself to a descriptive
exposition of Hegel' s views. To be sure,
Wood does an excellent job of this; but at
times one wishes for more critical engagement with Hegel's ideas and more
attempt to bring them into relation with
modem discussion - and, yes, for intelligent criticism of them from an analytical
perspective. Nevertheless, as an account
of ideas which are often ferociously obscure and difficult, this book does an excellent and much-needed job. It contains
perhaps the fullest and best treatments of
Hegel's ethics available in English. For
that Wood deserves the gratitude of even
the most committed Hegelians.
Sean Sayers
62
c. Fred Alford, The Self in Social
Theory. A Psychoanalytic Account of its
Construction in Plato, Hobbes, Locke,
Rawls and Rousseau, New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 1991.
viii + 229pp., £20.00 hb, 0 300 04922 6.
In this book the author sets out to show
that a 'strong' concept of the self needs to
be placed at the centre of debates in political philosophy. He seeks to expose an
'intractable problem' at the heart of the
Western tradition of political theory from
Plato onwards: namely, that a political
appreciation of the self must respect the
complexity of the self while at the same
time making it safe for society. The conclusion reached is that in social theory the
freedom of the 'subject' is compromised
for the sake of social order (and perhaps
for the subject's sake too, as in the
Rousseauian dictum of forcing the self to
be free), for 'there is no alternative. Or
rather, the alternative is to do what all the
theorists considered (except Hobbes) do,
Rousseau most of all. Representing this
compromise as if it were actually the realization of true selfhood and the like that is, tell the lie' . Alford wishes to maintain a delicate balance between the demands of both self and society,
recognising the necessity and benefits of
social order without jeopardising the integrity of the self. In the opening chapter
he usefully situates his argument in the
context of recent work by Alasdair
MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles
Taylor. He wants to avoid the pitfalls of
the aforementioned communitarians who,
he argues, surrender the freedom and integrity of the self to the community
(individuation is both constituted by the
community but independent of it too), and
of the liberalism of someone like John
Rawls which relies on such a thin or
'weak' notion of the self as to render it
trivial. The originality of his approach is
to be found in the novel way that he draws
on psychoanalysis - that of Heinz Kohut
and Lacan much more than Freud - to
give substance to his call for social and
political theory to develop a deep or
strong notion of the self.
Why the author has chosen the particular thinkers he has to examine the
problem of the self in social theory is
never explicitly justified (there are a few
references to a vague entity called 'liberal
traditionalism'), and the selection frequently assumes an arbitrary character.
Part of the reason probably lies in his
rejection of an historicist approach
(which would seek to show that the self is
first and foremost a historical concept) as
he does not wish to assume - to give one
example - that the self under capitalism
must always be a possessive individualist.
While this anti-reductionist posture mer-
its respect, it does mean that the book
lacks a real coherence owing to some
glaring omissions: is it possible to discuss
such a topic as the self without any reference to Nietzsche? (The argument that
Nietzsche is of no relevance to political
theory has now been rendered obsolete
with some major studies on this topic in
recent years.) Kant and Hegel are only
mentioned in passing, as is Foucault
(whose late work should be crucial to
Alford's concerns), and nothing is said
about Richard Rorty's 'post-modern'
reading of Rawls. In many instances,
therefore, the book has the flavour of a
'work in progress', cutting slices into the
texts of some of the key thinkers of the
tradition of political theory; and while the'
readings of particular thinkers are often
incisive and instructive (the one on Rawls
is the most novel), the book as a whole
lacks a coherent unifying narrative which
would lend (even more) instruction to the
important story of the self the author
wishes to relate. Despite these flaws, the
book is a thought-provoking contribution
to political thinking, adventurous in approach if limited in scope.
Keith Ansell-Pearson
Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (1991), Oxford, Blackwell, 1991,
£60.00 hb., 0 63116 211 9) forms part of
the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, a reference series designed to cover
not only analytic philosophy but Continental and non-Western traditions as well
. The collection is made up of 47 original
essays which are divided into sections,
each addressing a different aspect of ethics. These range from a historical outline
of Western ethical traditions to a consideration of specific themes: how we ought
to live, the nature of ethics and an overview of the application of ethics to contemporary problems. The strengths of the
collection lie in the inclusion of a section
on non-Western ethics (Indian, Buddhist,
Islamic and classical Chinese ethics), areas that are not usually covered in histories of the subject, and papers mapping
the new directions ethics is currently taking, for example feminist and environmental ethics. The collection is
extensively indexed with valuable crossreferences which, together with useful
bibliographies and further reading suggestions that are included at the end of
each entry, aid the book in its aim as a
reference volume. This is more a collection for those already acquainted with the
subject, and the originality of the papers
makes it interesting reading for those who
are.
Lucy Frith
Radical Philosophy 61, Summer 1992