Notes on Civil Society

Notes on Civil Society

Introduction

One could thus say that history is action

in the realm of the imaginary, or even the

spectacle that one gives oneself of an action.

Merleau-Ponty

In one scene of Werner Herzog’s film, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,“ Hauser, the main character, dreams of the desert. There, the old, and blind Berber chief, is asked by his people, who are afraid of being lost, to lead them into the city. He kneels down and touches the earth with his ear, as though listening, stands up, and points with his hand toward the horizon. The caravan goes on its way. In that movement we can only guess at what that city will hold for them. And what city is that anyway? Someone may comment that nonexistent cities are to be dismissed, a mere figment of the poetic imagination. Someone may have challenged the blind man into showing him the location of the city on a map. The man may have replied that the city has already been encountered, and there is certainly more cities beyond the horizon.

What matters is that the caravan of trade and commerce must make its way, its inroads, through the dry sands of the desert. It pushes forward, because this is the only available direction. The footsteps left on the sand, with the camels that are laden with the goods of commerce, trace the potential of the social encounter. Beyond the language of truth, representations, mappings, and surveyors; the old, blind Berber chief appropriates the world not as a mere presence, but the immediate possibility of the encounter that he can claim to be his own.

The spirit encounters the world, and with this encounter it encounters the social space. The Berber chief knows that this encounter can not be avoided. Also, in encountering the social space, the spirit encounters itself, a projection of activity and commerce. In this encounter, the spirit discovers a cosmopolitan structure colonized by the commodity and codified with tradition. The spirit knows that these encounters are unavoidable, and necessary, for from within them arises the conscious forces that can reflect and act on the process of encountering itself. Thus, the spirit is constituted by the encounter, and the social sphere. Beyond them, the spirit succumbs into a formless void. To avoid them, the spirit reflects needlessly on an ahistoric state of being; thus, it lies wasted and deceived. In the flight to avoid the social, the spirit either seeks the myth of nature, or history in the form of Merleay-Ponty’s realm of the imaginary -- a mere spectacle or an exhibition of arranged actions.

The Return to Nature

Oh Shamash[1], you scan the world with

your light as though it is a clay tablet.

Derrida, (mis)quoting a Mesopotamian priest

The return to nature is a theme that recurs quite often in the Critical Theory as practiced by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. Although the intention is to effect Rebellion and individual Freedom through the retrieval of a social dialectic from within the age of modernity and enlightenment, there appears to be an essential ontology that claims to be historic. This ontology is centered on the figure of Nature. In a philosophy that calls for disenchantment and freeing one from the ties of Myth, this ontology gets to be a center of contention. However, even when the intention is to discuss the possibility of freedom in the form of the two-dimensional man, the freedom is risked by being achieved beyond the social realm, in a basic return to an imagined Nature.

Certainly, the vocabulary introduced by the practitioners of Critical Theory is important as it opens the horizon of understanding of different social issues. The problem is the impossibility of total emancipation from the walls of power that disperse themselves throughout the social field. This should not mean that the possibility of rebellion is relinquished; rather, it means that rebellion and freedom are always in the making within the social field. The remaking of rebellion on the part of an individual takes the form of a special configuration; specially, in an age that is characterized by what Baudrillard describes as the age of Simulation--an age that’s controlled by the code.

My starting point is a quote by Foucault from “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:”

The historical sense can evade metaphysics and become a privileged instrument of genealogy if it refuses the certainty of the absolutes. Given this, it corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements--the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of his past.

Beside noting the clear Heideggerian influence here; specially, in the last sentence, the first thing we ask is to inquire into the nature of these absolutes, and that capability to shatter the unity of man’s being. The shattering of being is the shattering of what constitutes the historical being of man. It is what constitutes the social man. In turn, it is the constitution that transforms history into action in the realm of the imaginary.[2] My intention is to discuss the possibility of this “shattering,” as a moment of flight from the metaphysics of history but from within the metaphysics of history. Embedded in that view is a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of erasing society and state, or the return into the fold of an imaginary nature. On the contrary, my intention is to stress on the impossibility of understanding, that unit of enlightened thinking, but to show that understanding is a product of the institution in particular, and the state in general. So, Rebellion, Emancipation, and Freedom that arise out of a pure consideration of understanding risk the danger of being captured into the realm of the imaginary in the form of ideological formations.

Understanding, and the politics of understanding, belong to the same field that produces techniques of control. As such it is a technology that “cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put.” (HM, p. xvi).[3] To extend the concept of technology beyond its physical appeal may prove to be useful. Because understanding lends itself nicely to the process by which society is kept as a cohesive whole. It is a reflection of the imposed unity on History, and it arises from Reason and the logic of precise considerations. The problem is that Enlightenment is the resource under which understanding is effected. Enlightenment aims, after all, at freeing the world from Myth and fear and establishing sovereignty through disenchantment of the world. In addition, it is based on the concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things. In this scheme, knowledge is power, and technology is the essence of this knowledge. (A&H, pp. 3-5). However, Adorno and Horkheimer set out to discover “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” Although they avoid any attempt to reconstruct history, their work is a clear attempt toward a philosophy of history. The dialectic of enlightenment is a dialectic by which enlightenment carries within it an aversion toward myth, but also the forces that can revert it back to a historical myth. Nietzsche and Hegel recognized the dialectic of enlightenment at work. But while Hegel posited some unfolding of history toward a universal goal, Nietzsche recognized Reason as new tool to understand reality and nature and to control them. Of course, enlightenment insists on not leaving anything outside its sphere of influence and understanding in its quest to catalogue, rationalize and explain nature. This means that everything should be within the human capability to control and dominate. This had entailed the separation of nature and humans. Nature emerges as the field where objects are configured, and nothing is left to the imagination, and matter is defined as a possible object of man’s manipulation. (HM, p. 155). In this view, science regains a measure of neutrality in its quest to understand and control nature. This neutrality is seen in the separation between the pure sciences and applied sciences, where “pure science is not applied science; it retains its identity and validity apart from its utilization.” (HM, p. 155). However, “ a closer relationship seems to prevail between scientific thought and its application, between the universe of scientific discourse and that of ordinary discourse and behavior.” (HM, p. 155). Of interest is that neither Marcuse, nor Adorno and Horkheimer are convincing in what they perceive as Nature and what constitutes this nature. One reason may be that Critical Theory addresses particular historical questions in particular historical settings. A tension is embedded in this fact, namely, how to proceed from this consideration without falling into the trap of the historical setting that Critical Theory would want to address. The trap is linguistic and it arises from the notion of ‘immanent criticism.’ Adorno gave priority to immanent criticism having reverted to the field of history as a field that is in a continuous state of change and flux. “Immanent criticism depends for its validity on the discovery of a discrepancy between a subject/object’s concept and its actuality. Such an analysis rests on being able to uncover the guiding idea of a phenomenon and to disentangle the self-contradictions which the phenomenon displays in itself.” (Held, p. 382). The difficulty arises from the lack of a cognitive foundation, and configuration of concepts and objects, and the lack of a powerful historical genealogy. Also, immanent criticism operates from within the same space that is populated by enlightenment and its objects. An attempt to criticize the nature of this space is an attempt to recreate a nature that stands beyond this space; yet, a vague undefined nature. And is not immanent criticism a reminder of the same enchanted world? Does not it elevate itself into the same mythic position that it tries to destroy?

For human freedom to be an accessible project and a legitimate quest it must be found, first and foremost, in the same space that defines its demise and inaccessibility. We may have to avoid an ontology of nature altogether, but an ontology of Man/Nature may be a different story altogether. An ontology of Man/Nature that is based on Foucault’s historical sense that can evade metaphysics and become a privileged instrument of genealogy if it refuses the certainty of the absolutes. This takes us into the constituency of Civil Society and the elements of its enlightenment that are always in the making. The dilemma is in the historic sense that is given to enlightenment as a particular era. This opens the way into a historical division that takes into account certain configurations that are based on this division. May I venture to turn the attention that an immanent criticism or a critical theory may end up using these configurations as criteria of analysis. For these configurations make their appearance as linguistic parcels of discussion.

The constitution of Civil Society is the production of thinking that defines its institutions and maps its contours of representations. The issue of technology and its instrumentations are as inseparable from this constitution as the social outline that snakes its way in the process of creating historic products of language and intrumentations. In this interplay, what should be dramatized is the “ontological limitations of Foucault’s genealogy of the microphysical power relations in the post-Enlightenment disciplinary society.” (Spanos, p. 20). The modern power structure of modern societies makes itself felt not in any process of failed emancipation of myth and what constitutes myth. It is felt in the demands that it creates and realizes. Henri Lefebvre (Critique, p. 9) has the following to say:

Agreed, it is not unusual to find peasants owning electric cookers, but the houses they live in are still dilapidated; they manage to buy gadgets, but cannot afford to repair their houses, and even less to modernize their farms. In other words, the latter are given up for the sake of the former. In the same way quite a large number of working class couples have a washing machine, a television set, or a car, but they have generally sacrificed something else for these gadgets (having a baby, for example). In this way problems of choosing what to buy - or problems associated with hire-purchase, etc. - are posed within working-class families, and these problems modify everyday life. That relatively poor peasants, or workers, should buy television sets proves the existence of a new social need [.....] Far from suppressing criticism of everyday life, modern technical progress realizes it.

Although we can argue that the creation of needs is as ancient as the most ancient of public institutions in the most ancients of cities, a defining character of the modern age is that a criticism is realized by these needs. Also, a defining moment of the modern age is that Rebellion may be discussed in terms of the appropriation of the objective reality where “in a world from which the harsh strains of capitalism have removed thought and reflection, a poet who can stimulate a sense of the eternal and of death into consciousness is the true rebel, a figure whose colonial diminishments spur him to a negative apprehension of his society and of ‘civilized’ modernity.” (Said, p. 228). However, to go back to Foacault’s ‘Shattering of Being,’ and the ‘glance’ that separates and disperses; we may note that in a genealogy that follows from such shattering and dispersal[4], the individual appropriates the objective reality through the appropriation of what he can claim to be ultimately his; namely, his own Death[5]. Otherwise, what is actually the point of the genealogy and the retrieval of the social dialectics in the social circle of complete perversion of power and domination. And in the particularity of the historical setting, Death is the appropriation of the past. The path of freedom in the circle of archival genealogies and linguistic parcels of representations can only send its ‘jolts’ through the cosmopolitan structure by the individual appropriating his own Death. For in the field of representations that cannot be erased or avoided, and that stamps its own text on the social field, dispersing like waves through the passages of human interaction, Death remains as the realization of Rebellion and Liberation through effecting its own syntax.

Marcuse’s theme that the one-dimensional culture is characterized by the absorption of oppositional elements, takes on an urgent turn when these elements are shown to be incapable of revealing their power as being subversive forces with a strong destructive content. It remains to be seen what is this destructive content. Certainly, the authentic individual is an active participant in creating this content. One aspect of this content is the transformation of the meaning of technology and its instrumentations on both levels; that of the physical aspect, and that of the linguistic. On the other hand, the two-dimensional culture is characterized by the realization of the full potential of the individual where productivity mobilizes society as a whole. If the contrast between the two cultures is that over the difference between the world as a mere appearance and the world as a concretely real presence, we may inquire about the ‘historicality’ of this theme. Will there be a force that will have the capability to effect this change? The history of domination and deceit extends as far as anyone can reach with thought. Even a story such as that of “Odysseus” is deconstructed beneath the scrutinizing eyes of Adorno and Horkheimer into elements of exploitation where Odysseus masters nature by rational calculation. If history is any indication, it indicates that the mere existence of the social sphere and state points to history as a locus of appearances and exhibitions. Exhibitions “open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. They submit to being manipulated while enjoying their alienation from themselves and others.” (Benjamin, pp. 151-152). The world of facades and exhibits, models and simulations, is certainly to be understood in relation to the wider capitalist transformation, but one that finds an echo that extends into the depth of history. The world as an exhibition is a site of the commodity fetish. As a commodity, Marx explains, an object is treated as a mysterious ‘social hieroglyphic’ representing the imaginary productive process. It no longer represents to people the real labor and the real social lives of those who actually made it. (Marx, pp. 1:163-177). The theory of commodity fetishism rests, however, on revealing such representations to be misrepresentations. To the mechanism of misrepresentation by which power operates, Marx opposed a representation of the way things intrinsically are, in their transparent and rational reality. This, of course, is what echoes through Marcuse’s work. However, the problem with such an explanation is that, in revealing power to work through misrepresentation, it leaves representation itself unquestioned. It accepts absolutely the distinction between a realm of representations and the ‘external reality’ which such representations promise, rather than examining the novelty of continuously creating the effect of an ‘external reality’ as itself as a mechanism of power. Anyway, what is the transparent and rational reality, which capitalist representation misrepresents really is? The fact of material production once one lifts the veil of the misrepresentation? If material production is a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature, thus acting upon the external world and changing it (Marx, p. 173 & p. 283); if such is the case, then, as Jean Baudrillard points out, it remains itself a language, a social hieroglyphic, no less a representation, and thus no more a transparency, than the commodity fetish or the ancient worship of nature. (Baudrillard, pp. 21-51).

Two Positions

The main event of the modern age

is the conquest of the world as a picture.

Heidegger

The two positions above cannot be simply reconciliated. It is only on a certain ‘poetic’

plane that the old Berber chief can claim to encounter the world as the concrete reality of his own experience. The fact of material production that is impressed on the backs of the camels as they make their headway, does not contradict the intrinsically transparent reality of the tribesmen. But the Berber chief had thrown away the maps that make him act upon the external world to change it. The external world is the mere movement of the caravan in the desert. Beyond this movement, there are the entrapments of the metaphysics of history. He must have guessed that on the sides of the footsteps left by the caravan on the sand of the desert lies the ‘objective world.’ Something to be gazed upon, and inspected. Something to fill him with the modern sense of detachment, both physical and conceptual, of the self from an object-world.

Marx himself, although he wanted none of the accompanying political passivity, conceived of an essential separation between the person and an object-world, in the same way, in terms of a structure or plan existing apart from things themselves. What distinguished the objective man from ‘external’ nature was his ability to make an interior mental map; and the Berber chief relives the tension between the ‘external’ nature that is mediated by the interior mental map, and the world that is formed in its immediacy by the movement of the caravan. It is on the borderline between these two views that violence is perpetrated, and Foucault’s historical sense may correspond to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements, and capable of shattering the unity of man’s being. Thus, finally, we can speak of gathering against sheltering[6] as two terms that arise from these encounters.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean.The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975.

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.

HBJ, 1978.

Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas.

California, 1980.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Continuum, 1994.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I. Verso, 1992.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimentsional Man. Beacon Press, 1964.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.

Spanos, William. Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics

of Destruction. Minnesota, 1993.

[1] Shamash, the Sun-God, is an ancient Semitic god.

[2] The use of the word “imaginary” as quoted by Merleau-Ponty is unfortunate, since I’ll be using the word “imagination” later to denote a different sort of action.

[3] HM is short for Herbert Marcuse, and, for later, A&H is short for Adorno and Horkheimer.

[4] We cannot help but notice a ‘poetic’ connotation of violence in this ‘shattering,’ parting dispersal etc.

[5] Please see last sectoin of the paper, A Polemic on the State.