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Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Assault on Hedonism, Part 1: Plutarch
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
This morning, as I was rummaging in my fridge for celery, tomato juice, and raw eggs, it occurred to me that an all-out attack on the “permissive hedonism” of our society has begun. For conservatives, the theme is already familiar and exhausted; it derives from a particular interpretation of Christian moralism, and takes the rhetorical form of a defense of values, and a return to values. It is a shelter for homophobia, panopticism, evangelism—and sexism, since the threat of pleasure frequently comes in the tempting form of a woman. It is also a bait-and-switch. Conservative politicians with primarily economic agendas pay lip service to values, and the worrisome decline of values.
For liberals, however, criticizing hedonism is an innovation. In a recent post at Long Sunday, CR reminded us of a question W. J. T. Mitchell asked back in 2003, in an introduction to the “Future of Criticism” special issue of Critical Inquiry:
It has been suggested that theory now has backed off from its earlier sociopolitical engagements and its sense of revolutionary possibility and has undergone a “therapeutic turn” to concerns with ethics, aesthetics, and care of the self, a turn of which Lacan is the major theoretical symptom. True?
The phrase “care of the self” is a nod to Michel Foucault, who popularized the phrase in his multi-volume History of Sexuality. Foucault, who conceived The History of Sexuality as an attack on the dogma of sexual liberation, helped dissociate political theory from the old counterculture view that personal freedom was politically valuable. In other words, the “therapeutic turn” is inaccurately named. What really turned, taking ethics and aesthetics along with it, were the attitudes towards discipline and pleasure.
Therefore, Slavoj Zizek’s review of the film 300 is not, contra the claims of his apologists, an aberration or a falling-off. Zizek’s calls for discipline are a fundamental articulation of the dominant fantasies of contemporary theory. Since this conversation, about pleasure and about ancient Greece, is over-determined by the studies of the pleasures of the Greeks, that is where we have to look. Here, I’ll be framing the triangle of culture, pleasure, and politics using Plutarch’s comparison between Spartan and Roman rule. In my next post, I’ll draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance to understand the problem discipline is trying to solve. Ultimately, I will argue that we have to decide between the futile discipline that opposes itself to pleasure, and the spontaneous discipline of aesthetics, which is constructed by pleasure.
The nature of all discipline antagonistic to pleasure is war. 300 is a film about the Battle of Thermopylae; after watching it, Zizek praises it for its “Spartan spirit of military discipline.” Alain Badiou, in his book on Saint Paul, announced that contemporary philosophy is on the hunt for a way to resurrect the “militant” as an exemplary figure. Of course, as Daniel at Antigram has written, there is no way to determine what is pure, untainted discipline, and what is masochistic pleasure; the important point is that the rhetoric is anti-hedonistic.
Zizek argues that in order to understand Sparta, we ought to “subtract all historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule” and “ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves.” Plutarch, who greatly admired the Spartans, felt no such divestment was possible. His comparison between the Spartan founder, Lycurgus, and the Roman, Numa Pompilius, is a crucial starting-point:
As the musicians tune their harps, so the one let down the high-flown spirits of the people at Rome to a lower key, as the other screwed them up at Sparta to a higher note, when they were sunken low by dissoluteness and riot. The harder task was that of Lycurgus; for it was not so much his business to persuade his citizens to put off their armour or ungird their swords, as to cast away their gold or silver, and abandon costly furniture and rich tables; nor was it necessary to preach to them, that, laying aside their arms, they should observe the festivals, and sacrifice to the gods, but rather, that, giving up feasting and drinking, they should employ their time in laborious and martial exercises....Numa’s muse was a gentle and loving inspiration, fitting him well to turn and soothe his people into peace and justice out of their violent and fiery tempers; whereas, if we must admit the treatment of the Helots to a part of Lycurgus’s legislation, a most cruel and iniquitous proceeding, we must own that Numa was by a great deal the more humane and Greek like legislator, granting even to actual slaves a license to sit at meat with their masters at the feast of Saturn, that they also might have some taste and relish of the sweets of liberty....[Numa] ruled a city that as yet had scarce become one city, without recurring to arms or any violence (such as Lycurgus used, supporting himself by the aid of the nobler citizens against the commonalty). (trans. Dryden)
Lycurgus, in this account, maintains martial discipline through the repressive use of internal force, and by encouraging continual war against the Helots, an enslaved population. (George Orwell appropriated this analysis, and Lycurgus reads nowadays as Orwellian.) And, in fact, it is clear enough how our contemporary rhetoric repeats this “screwing up” to “a higher note” through violence. Jodi Dean employs the vocabulary of sabotage, urging us toward a “discipline and spirit of sacrifice” working like “objects jamming the machinery of enjoyment.”
To whom are these paeans to discipline addressed? Who is it that lacks discipline and lives hedonistically? The answer is the consumer, or rather that portion of each individual’s life taken up by consumption. Let’s assume that our own desire, in the midst of a drawn-out, unjust, costly war, is to let down our spirits to a lower key, instead of embracing the incursion of militarism into every venue for art and culture. At least, since we have to start somewhere, to start by tackling the relationship between consumption and pleasure, and the silent withdrawal of the festival from daily life.
To be continued.
Comments
Joseph, I’m in the process of reading Simon Reynold’s *Rip It Up and Start Again*, a history of postpunk music (much of which started before punk). What’s striking is how what Holbo and SEK describe as the uncritical eclecticism meets disciplinary PC-ness in bands like Gang of Four. All these children of post-industrial Britain (and, to take Devo and Pere Ubu, the U.S.) were reading Situationist anthologies, JG Ballard and PK Dick, had access to art-school Theory , and assembled it all into an art that at once played at consumerism while criticizing almost every form of pleasure as, at its roots, political. But on the other side of the postpunk spectrum, you have Throbbing Gristle, and their hedonistic performance art. Cosi Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge would fuck each other with a double-headed dildo on stage, P-Orridge would give himself milk enemas and fart it out into the audience, etc. Interestingly, this hedonism comes out of the bands flirtations with De Sade and fascism.
So you have a Puritan Marxism and a polymorphously perverse Fascism. For me, the happy medium is Twee: a return to the pleasures of holding hands, of shyness—but a shyness that is always one step away from hooking up. It’s conservative in its rejection of balls-out hedonism, but revolutionary in its rejection of the personal=political baloney. It gives us our relationships back wrapped in a light cloth of ethics: “be kind” is always the hidden message of Twee.
I thought Zizek’s piece was written on an autopilot set to the contrarian setting. More striking is the defense by Jodi Dean, which is written purely in the language of neo-conservativism. They’re really big on the notion of sacrifice, too.
There is something deeply comic about this entire network of linked posts.
First one reads Mitchell quoted as writing “It has been suggested that theory now has backed off from its earlier sociopolitical engagements [...]” What sociopolitical engagements? Did they ever exist, except in fantasy? The true purpose of this question appears to me to be the falsification of history; by asking whether there has been a turn away from engagement, the question of whether there ever was engagement is quietly answered without examination. And this gives a double benefit—the present can be mourned as worse than the past, the past can be glorified as more than it was. Both are fundamental principles of nostalgia, the abiding problem of the left at this historical moment.
Next you have Zizek quoted as doing what he has always done: extolling discipline. Hello, people, Zizek’s heroes are Lenin and Paul. What do these people have in common? Well, “the formation of world-dominating hierarchies” might be one answer.
Next Jodi Dean earnestly writes “But why shouldn’t leftists value discipline and organization?” There should be some kind of ad-hom slur, like “chickenhawk”, for those who recommend left discipline while being academic. Because of the association of Dr. Martens boots with vaguely leftist skinheads and punks, I suggest “Dr. Martinet”. It’s very easy for a dr. martinet to recommend discipline, for the same reason as a chickenhawk recommends war—they’re not going to do it. People who actually do left political work think of organization and discipline as two entirely different terms; the whole advance of the left since the fall of the communists has been around how to organize without discipline.
And of course there’s the question of discipline for what? Whatever Jodi Dean’s or Zizek’s idea of the left is, I doubt that their goals are shared by more than a tiny scattering of people, being as they are neither really Marxist nor social-democratic nor liberal. The first move of any leftism with discipline might be to tell them to be silent and accept the party line. But this is not something that any could even be worried about, because there is no party line either in the sense of a party or of a line. The total failure to understand this is, as I’ve said, deeply comical—at least with Zizek, I’m pretty sure that it’s a joke that he’s playing on others.
I’m not sure Foucault was anti-pleasure. He seemed mostly to say that sexual liberation was a shuck. That’s how I read Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” too, though Marcuse always seemed to go the long way around the barn.
A lot of sexual liberation, the shock-your-parents part, is just an antagonistic ritualization of coming-of-age in a vague generation-struggle context, pasted onto a contentless progressive-rebellion schtick.
Just shifting the focus elsewhere than sex strikes me as a positive move, though you have to decide what your new focus will be once you do that. The classical disciplines and their humanist developments (e.g. Montaigne) tended to have a military / state elite focus, but there are many private disciplinary forms (e.g. Taoism in China, and Epicureanism and Cynicism in the West.)
Some Christian asceticic discipline was initially private but was vacuumed up by the institutional church in order to contain a threat.
Based on my own life and the lives of the people I’ve known, “just follow your feelings and desires” is the worst possible advice, leaving you wide open for every form of disaster and predator, and yes, there were bigname people whose message amounted to little more than that.
Luther,
You write:
So you have a Puritan Marxism and a polymorphously perverse Fascism. For me, the happy medium is Twee: a return to the pleasures of holding hands, of shyness—but a shyness that is always one step away from hooking up. It’s conservative in its rejection of balls-out hedonism, but revolutionary in its rejection of the personal=political baloney. It gives us our relationships back wrapped in a light cloth of ethics: “be kind” is always the hidden message of Twee.
I’ve become sort of mistrustful of twee music, because I think it skews a little simple, and sometimes very conservative, particularly in the case of Belle & Sebastian. But I also appreciate its pastoral settings and its gentleness. Probably a lot of what I like and dislike about twee will become clear from the second post.
Rich,
There is an amusing overlap between what you’re saying here about political nostalgia, and what I say in my post about the nostalgia for childhood. I might well have also nodded to the fact that the 1960s are frequently represented (for example, in Forrest Gump) as a sort of happy, foolish childhood, in a way that exceeds the mere fact of the Baby Boomer timeline.
I completely agree with you about the strange, disconnected version of politics being advanced here. I couldn’t really have taken the post towards an examination of non-hierarchical, parallel organizing without exceeding my mandate. That said, I think it’s worth responding on the level of aesthetic culture, because I think the effects of these proclamations will mostly be on literary theory and criticism. They may prove effective simply because they match up so well with lurking conservative antipathies towards art and tolerant governance.
John,
I agree with you that Foucault wasn’t anti-pleasure; he was anti-foundationalist, including towards pleasure. Actually, he took a very aestheticist turn in The Use of Pleasure, which is far less popular than the first volume of the History of Sexuality.
In the second post, I’m arguing for a version of self-determination mediated by craft; my whole approach here is affected by the question of consumerism. Of course, one could object to consumerism in Stoic or religious terms. The religious objection, in my view, has had enough turns at bat already; the Stoic objection falls rather to one side of the inquiry into subject and object, focusing as it does on restraint of appetite rather than intensity of experience.
Thanks, Joseph, for opening up another intriguing line of thought.
While it is easy to praise discipline and morality from the sidelines, is it also not possible that the capacity to restrain one’s appetites might well take on a greater importance in the coming years, since the globe will have to confront scarcities in vital resources as well as grapple with the effects of climate change? War, after all, can come about from the lack of discipline (i.e. the denial of the necessity of belt-tightening measures, of living austerely, of changing the conditions of one’s daily life) and the desire to continue living without restraint. Although Rich is correct to point out that the idea of discipline has a rather limited validity with respect to the traditional projects of the revolutionary left, I think that it holds enormous promise and relevance on a broader scale with reference to the basic question of human survival. We will have to learn to conquer our desires if we are to avoid descending into endless wars over diminishing resources. As La Rochefoucauld once put it, “We promise according to our hopes, we perform according to our fears.”
I know Zizek has taken a lot of stick for this review, and with some cause. What I dislike about it is not the reading per se ("autopilot set to the contrarian setting” as Walt says, which is fine by me) but what it implies about Zizek’s Freudian-Lacanianism. He undertakes a simple, indeed banal, decoding of the film, like a Freudian analyst translating the manifest content of a dream directly into its latent content. The manifest meaning of the film is heroic martial values at the root of Western civilisation; the latent meaning is the reverse of this, it’s the Taliban fighting off the US Cavalry.
But I thought the whole appeal of a Lacanian perspective is that it avoids, or at least complicates, that reductive, one-to-one mapping: that idea that Freud is the key to unlock a stable meaning from all mysteries—to read, rather, for the very uncertainties and insecurites of the way signification happens. Not to tabulate symbols, but to explore the way meaning resists and overturns symbolisation. By which I mean: whether you buy it or not, at least its cleverer. And some early Zizek goes out of its way to avoid simplistic decoding readings. He seems to have given up on all that.
"Zizek argues that in order to understand Sparta, we ought to “subtract all historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule” and “ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves.” Plutarch, who greatly admired the Spartans, felt no such divestment was possible.”
I don’t know Zizek, but this sounds like nonsense. In order to understand a culture, we should just focus on selected aspects of it? Of course Plutarch would have felt ‘no such divestment’ possible--it is meaningless, in the terms you’ve put it.
Also, I don’t know if Plutarch is being used as a mere foil here. But you might want to look at his views on prose and verse, in “Why the Oracle is no Longer Given in Verse”, online here. The new prose oracles, which are associated with the prose lawcodes of Lycurgus, are compared to simple living: “So, as language also underwent a change and put off its finery, history descended from its vehicle of versification, and went on foot on prose, whereby the truth was mostly sifted from the fabulous.”
But these are also associated with the current peace in 100 AD: “Our present settled condition, out of which the questions now put to the God arise, I welcome and accept. There is great peace and tranquility, war has been made to cease, there are no wanderings in exile, no revolutions, no tyrannies, no other plagues or ills in Greece asking for potent and extraordinary remedies.”
Plutarch was at pains to correlate the peaceful state of his Greece with the strong regulation of Spartan society--and the obvious comparison here is Plato.
Peter Paik: “is it also not possible that the capacity to restrain one’s appetites might well take on a greater importance in the coming years, since the globe will have to confront scarcities in vital resources as well as grapple with the effects of climate change?”
I’m not sure how easy it is going to be to answer this readably—but in short, I think that this question is not right in a number of very important ways.
1. It’s really a question about sustainability. Sustainability really is not a question of discipline, it’s a question of how society’s infrastructure (part physical, part social) is built. If people must drive in gas-powered cars to get to work, no amount of “discipline” will help in the long term. If their cars are powered through renewable means, then discipline in their use is probably not needed. If work is located close to where people live, you don’t have to discipline them to only walk back and forth a certain amount. You may have to “discipline” employers into locating close to living space—but disciplining employers is a completely different matter from belt-tightening for the people who the left is supposedly working for.
2. Environmental “discipline”, as opposed to substitution, is mostly a product of corporate greenwashing. There is no end of people telling you to take various petty measures to decrease one’s individual environmental harm; I view these as ways of using up people’s energy while doing no good. There are specific societal circumstances, e.g. local water shortages, in which a call for everyone to save water can work. But remaining within the whole structure while attempting to purely individually use less of it generally does not work.
3. “Vital resources” are generally not limited, in the sense that people usually think of when they use this phrase, in which ecological qualities do not count as “vital resources” but commodities do. They are mostly more or less expensive, which throws this right back to economics. People really need to know a lot about classical neoliberal economics to address this or they will get tripped up by it.
4. “Discipline” is not a goal of the left, at least, not a goal of any left that I’m interested in. Nor is it really a goal of environmentalism, which is about meta-rules for societal design, not about controlling what people do within those rules. When you are restrained from killing people or stealing from them, you don’t think of that as “discipline”; your inability to hold and sell people as slaves is not “discipline”, etc.
5. Discipline is a war value. If we bungle things so that there is a shortage, and discipline becomes necessary for survival, that *increases* the chances of going to war over what remains.
There’s more—a lot more—but suffice it to say that I think that people have thought about this.
Rich,
I think that sustainability, as well as the development of any new economic system, must rely upon inward restraints if a new way of life is to unfold. Rules only work if there is an inner readiness on the part of the people to follow then. Given that this is so, how much more difficult it will be for people to observe new rules (the perennial challenge of revolution).
To think otherwise is to deny the daunting character of the obstacles that industrialized societies are now facing - to get to sustainability will require greater degrees of restraint and discipline. People will have to be persuaded that limitless economic development is not a good in and of itself, that there should even be limits on how much money they can make, how much they can consume, how much and what kinds of technology they can use, etc.
You say that when one is “restrained from killing or enslaving others,” this is not a matter of “discipline.” But then, what are we to make of the fact that the great majority of the men in the Confederacy preferred to risk their lives in battle, embracing military discipline along the way, than to live in a world where they would have to relinquish the practice of slavery? That many non-slaveholders in the South had dreams that they too would someday would be able to own slaves themselves?
Discipline is often a “war value,” but I believe that in global capitalism, it is even more truly a peace value. After all, it takes great restraint to endure hardship rather than to blame it on others, especially upon other nations and cultures.
As for your critique of environmental discipline, I can only say that war efforts demand strenuous efforts on the part of the population. Many of the measures instituted on the home front during World War II, such as victory gardens, were in retrospect not very fundamental in practical terms, but they did instill in the people the daily awareness of the vital struggle in which the nation was engaged. What a stark contrast in comparison to the present, in which the US is engaged in a bitter and intractable conflict while the bulk of the population simply goes on leading a normal life of consumerism. Such efforts, though not immediately useful, nevertheless helped morale. When it comes to a struggle on a global scale, such as confronts us now, it is inevitable that the struggle to meet such a challenge will produce what might appear to be superfluous practices.
"I think that sustainability, as well as the development of any new economic system, must rely upon inward restraints if a new way of life is to unfold. Rules only work if there is an inner readiness on the part of the people to follow them.”
Peter, I’m sorry, but I think that you have this completely wrong. People don’t decide to use gasoline to drive, and didn’t decide to use CFCs for refrigeration, because of lack of inward restraints. They use them because they are what society makes available. Nor did people give up lead in gasoline, or CFCs for refrigeration, because of inward restraints. Laws were passed that affected manufacturers, those manufacturers changed their products, and people went on using what was available.
There are various reasons why people like to preach discipline. As I wrote above, there are many societal actors who like it because they perceive correctly that it leads to nothing, politically or effectually. But there are others who preach it because they just like the idea of discipline. It gives a virtuous feeling, and substitues for actual power.
And the Confederacy is a good illustration of the difference, by the way. It was not “disciplined” into not permitting slavery. It was forced to, through war. If someone wants to murder someone, we don’t rely on “discipline”, self or otherwise, to stop them from doing so. We rely on force, and, of course, socialization into not doing things that our society responds to with force. Nor did people gain the moral power to oppose slavery through concern with “discipline” of any kind.
“As for your critique of environmental discipline, I can only say that war efforts demand strenuous efforts on the part of the population.”
Peter, again, this kind of thing is why I thought that “doc martinet” was a good phrase. What war are we in? Who is the “population” supposed to be fighting it? Who is the enemy? Who are the generals? Who decides what war efforts are best? Is there any reason why I should take this rhetoric of yours any more seriously than I take the rhetoric of someone who assures me that we need to invade Iran to bring them democracy, and any more reason not to suspect that the means being suggested will invalidate the ends?
Again, I’m not asking these rhetorical questions from a position of ignorance; I’ve worked as an environmental activist for the last 15 years or so. People have some idea what works and what doesn’t, and calls to discipline are the kind of thing that the upper-middle class always thinks will sound good. But it has very little attachment to reality: the realities of what needs to actually be done, of what people need, of what people want. I’ve used the WW II thing as propaganda, sure; I once put up posters for a recycling center that partially reproduced a WW II poster that read “Recycle for victory—and be proud.” But that was an appeal through nostalgia, not discipline, because there is no actual need for people to disciplinedly force themselves to recycle—you should do it because it’s about as easy as throwing something away, and because it gives you a slight satisfaction. Well, some people may do it because it gives them a masochistic self-disciplinary thrill, but not very many; I certainly wouldn’t base a campaign on it.
Rich--Your insulting remarks are beyond rude. You have no grounds to say imply that I as an academic recommend discipline without doing it. That is the sort of personalized attack that keeps me from coming over to this blog more often.
Jodi, what sort of discipline are you putting yourself under? If the answer turns out to be that you have made some kind of individualist choice to discipline yourself, will you retract your annoying accusation above?
You owe me an apology, Rich. And, your offensiveness is all the clearer in your attempt to deflect responsibility in advance.
No time for a substantive remark, but I think the topic is an important one, Joseph. I’m glad to see this discussion here.
BTW, in musical performance, discipline and passion CAN go hand in hand, though not necessarily so.
Now, Jodi, it’s a bit late for you to be standing on a principle of no ad homs, if that’s the problem. I see no reason to apologize for pointing out you have worked hard to achieve a position for which one of the major benefits is freedom from political discipline, only to recommend it for others.
I have not invoked a principle here. I have simply called you out for insulting me without cause or provocation. If you did not intend to insult me, then explain what you mean by ‘achieving a position for which one of the major benefits is freedom from political discipline’ and provide evidence for the claim that my having achieved this position means that I am free from political discipline.
If the explanation will help, your wish is my command.
Jodi, as far as I know, you are a tenured professor (at least, I assume that’s what “associate professor” means when you’ve been one for a while). Therefore, you have the single most protected type of job of anyone in the country. No politician can tell you what to write or what not to write; you can not be fired by a boss who doesn’t like your views; no party or nonprofit group can decide that you are an embarassment; no one can exercise positive control over what you write by offering to pay you when you need money. You are free from any kind of political discipline that you do not volunteer for.
Have you voluntarily joined a leftist political group that you agree should exercise discipline over your activity? Well, who knows, but I’ve never seen any sign of it on your blog. A quick scan of your post categories shows only one that is not concerned with political events that are not comfortably far away: Becoming Vegan. I’ll quote your post: “The superegoic enjoyment associated with contemporary hedonism is profoundly individualistic and personalized, the disciplining of the consuming, self-displaying body valued by neoliberalism.” Is that what you mean by discipline? I note that your original post references the slow food movement, the kind of thing that I associate with conspicuous consumption—most poor people do not have the time or money to be able to have slow food.
Quoting from your post again, you write that discipline “is the recognition that politics involves organization, responsibility, and a willingness to make hard choices [...]”. So what is your organization, what is your responsibility, what were your hard choices? You can’t have discipline as an abstract quality, unconnected to any actual group of people or praxis. Writing about the necessity of making hard choices in the abstract, without ever saying what they are, is not making hard choices. And perhaps the people who are doing actual work don’t like airy insistence on something that looks a lot like nostalgic Leninist vanguardism without even the risk or participation.
Or do you mean that you are willing to make the hard choice of giving up your privilege in the future, when the revolution comes? Well, perhaps—but that is strictly unknowable at this point, is it not?
But in all this you are typical of the “politically involved” academic, not unusual—I really didn’t mean that you were the only Doc Martinet in the world. People who are politically involved generally don’t have any trouble describing what they do. Take Berube, for example, an atypical academic, who has a political campaign to protect academic freedom against Horowitz and Horowitz’ right-wing funders. He has participated in debates, written public pieces, written a book intended for a somewhat general political readership, spoken to other professors about the need for this kind of activity. Not as a sole result, but certainly as a contributing factor, Horowitz appears to have stalled out. I assume that you aren’t sympathetic with this kind of liberal politics, given your apparent assertion that academia really should be under political discipline (of the “right kind"), but still, what have you done with your books? Written a theoretical model of democracy, and about aliens. Those are not political hard choices.
So, in short, I don’t think that I’ve “insulted you without cause or provocation”. I think that I’ve accurately described your political stance, and that you don’t like that description.
Rich--I don’t have a problem talking about what I do politically. I also don’t equate it with what I do professionally, although there are some points of overlap. I do have a problem with someone who doesn’t know me offering up insults and challenges, particularly with no provocation.
I have been involved in local politics (as a Democratic party ward representative and fundraiser) and national political campaigns on the local level--which involves petitioning, signature gathering, interviewing prospective candidates. I have been involved in local activist groups associated with anti-war activities (and I have blogged about these events). My experience in these matters informs to some extent my sense of the importance of organization and political discipline. I admire some of the old guys who stick with the local Democrats even as they let us down--they say that if they leave, then the bad guys win without a fight.
I have also blogged about attending protests. I mention this not because it has anything to do with discipline but because it has to do blogging about politics and political engagement. I have been involved in campus politics, which for me function as workplace organizing and collective bargaining matters (salary and benefits for staff, faculty, and union members although the latter is only at the level of pressure on the administration since that work is contracted out; all the other salaries are tied to each other in a collective system that has to be explained and defended, particularly to trustees who want to institute competitive merit pay). I don’t think of ‘becoming vegan’ (or the few posts associated with that) as political, at least not for me. In the post I refer to the Italian version of the slow food movement which was associated with farmers groups. I agree that the American version generally lacks this political edge.
I have edited two books that are less abstract than most of my writing--books on feminist politics and on NGOS and new media in global civil society. I also serve on the editorial boards of at least one journal that aims to intervene politically in international political discussions, Constellations. My book, Publicity’s Secret, is an intervention in discussions around the political claims of new media. And, yes, there I stake a political position and participate in debates and discussions to defend it. It’s not as popular as Berube’s book nor was it meant to be.
I don’t think that writing has to be for everyone or for a general audience. I think that theoretical work can have a different, more indirect kind of influence. And, I think that many of my articles (as well as book on Zizek and frequent invited lectures) that are critical of democracy and that challenge other theorists to think more critically about democracy might have an impact in that less direct way.
Jodi, first of all, while I am sympathetic to the desire not to be attacked, maybe I’ve misunderstood what you consider to be “insults and challenges”. I’ve never demanded an apology from you for the piece I linked to above, or wondered why someone I didn’t know was insulting me. The last time you opined about how thuggish the Valve was, you were promptly confronted about the tone on your blog, which you didn’t defend. So I see no reason why I should hold to a standard that you don’t seem to care about.
Now, in terms of content, I see nothing above that really matches your first-stated area of concern. You wrote that I should “explain what you mean by ‘achieving a position for which one of the major benefits is freedom from political discipline’ and provide evidence for the claim that my having achieved this position means that I am free from political discipline.” I did explain and provide evidence. Since you didn’t really contradict me, I guess that you agree that I did have grounds to write what I wrote.
Now, my counter-assertion was that organizing was necessary, but that discipline was not, and that the primary recent advances of the left had to do with finding ways to organize without discipline. Thus your professional work and participation in protests and anti-war groups seems to support my contention—it looks like a typical sort of “undisciplined”, ad-hoc involvement in issues that catch your attention. All to the good, as far as I’m concerned.
The primary element of your political work that might involve discipline is your work for the Democrats, despite your apparent disagreement with nearly every element of (mostly liberal or neoliberal) Democratic policy. You reinforce this with admiration of the people who “stick with the local Democrats even as they let us down”. I do think that it’s funny that Zizekian influence always seems to deflate in this manner—you start out trying to emulate Lenin, and end up supporting Clinton’s health plan—but I question whether this is really discipline in terms of commitment to anything more than an individual, pragmatic assessment of what your choices are. It’s not that you’re seriously committing to Democratic party discipline, such as it is, right? I would assume that you’re choosing it as the lesser of possible evils.
So, once again, I question this message as a useful one for people who are actually working towards actual leftist projects. It’s the message that was most recently used against Nader. (Note; I’m not a Green or a Naderite.) In electoral politics, the structure of the U.S. political system may make it necessary—and if you accept that, then you naturally should be one of the “netroots”—but most politics, and almost all particularly leftist politics, is nonelectoral. I asked about the organization / responsibility / hard choices that you mentioned. You’ve answered that your organization is the local Democratic party, your responsiblity is as ward rep and fundraiser, and that your hard choice is sticking with them even as they let you down. Very good; I accept that your actual activity, as an academic, is probably above the norm. You are one of the 300, holding bravely in the ranks, waiting to be overwhelmed. If you want to claim that as the form of discipline that makes you not hypocritically advocating it for others, then I will withdraw the characterization of “Doc Martinet”. But I think that’s a foolish and counterproductive form of discipline.
jesus christ, Rich. Jodi just flattened you. You owe her an apology.
I do think that it’s funny that Zizekian influence always seems to deflate in this manner—you start out trying to emulate Lenin, and end up supporting Clinton’s health plan—but I question whether this is really discipline in terms of commitment to anything more than an individual, pragmatic assessment of what your choices are.
Yes, well, such is life for the radical in America. You know damn well that you’d have off on her if she said the opposite, or really if she had said anything else, anything imaginable. Guess what: it is very much possible to make such a pragmatic choice and still do nothing at all. Which is exactly what I do - not to my credit. She is submitting to a form of discipline - the discipline that comes of holding your nose and participating in, yes, the lesser of many evils. (It is a form of discipline that I myself can’t quite stomach myself. I’ve said this before, but my full CV of Actual Political Activity includes one organizational meeting for Stanley Aronowitz’s 2002 run for governor as a Green. Stanley is a truly good guy, and deserves all the support he could get - but I cannot hack Actual Political Discipline, so thick and deep is my Flaubertian negativity… This is not something that I am proud of, not at all...) Jodi does well - if I were a better person, I would have submit to the same sort of discipline. You slandered her without cause.
I think you owe her an apology, not what you just wrote here. A semi-acknowledgement of her case that trails off into a critique of the institution that she works within? Come on.
Rich, I think that perhaps our use of terms is somewhat at a variance. Are you speaking from the view that preaching the benefits of discipline ultimately serves as an ideological support for capitalism - the idea that certain moral values are needed to keep the markets going? I do accept the argument that capitalism relies on and appeals to a moral framework, but I also think that it progressively hollows out and eats away at these vital supports, until it is left wallowing in its limbless decay.
I’m having a hard time getting a fix on your remarks. I know that the blog form isn’t the best medium for fixing the contours of an individual worldview in all of its splendor and glory, but I would like a bit of clarification. As I read each of your rebuttals, I find myself asking where your thoughts are leading. The ways we use and understand basic terms seem to be at odds with each other.
For example, I do not see much difference between force and discipline. Discipline is to my mind an expression of force, which arises out of the natural strategic capacity of every human being. But discipline is also related to habit, and may not always be immediately noticeable to conventional wisdom or the society at large. Thus religious and political movements can lie in wait and suddenly take command of the world stage.
“There are various reasons why people like to preach discipline. As I wrote above, there are many societal actors who like it because they perceive correctly that it leads to nothing, politically or effectually. But there are others who preach it because they just like the idea of discipline. It gives a virtuous feeling, and substitutes for actual power.”
But it is impossible to deny that political power throughout history has often been seized by subjects who were mobilized through discipline. I find it hard to believe that you are rejecting struggles for liberation that have been fought throughout the world against colonial powers. So are you criticizing discipline or the act of preaching it? An elementary reading of Nietzsche and Freud of course tells us that people often take great enjoyment in being, seeming, and speaking of morality and virtue. But actual power is something that can only be attained and exercised through discipline, is it not?
Also, as a potential Doc Martinet, should I feel guilty about distracting you from the vital tasks of changing the world through deeds, as opposed to talking about changing the world (through deeds or words)?
To those of you—Adam R., Conrad, Bill, Peter, and Rich—who have added your thoughts to this post or the one following, thank you. I was called away to other business for the day, and, with apologies, look forward to responding in the morning.
I’m obliged to respond now to the gathering storm. Ad hominem attacks cannibalize threads that begin with real disagreements, and leave a bitter taste. Furthermore, for someone in my position, mocking other academics for what they do is an absurdity. I am not prepared to respond to audits of my waking hours in these threads; Jodi, while I admire your decision to do so, I regret that you were made to feel such a thing was necessary. The relevance of discipline to contemporary politics and aesthetics, and the intersections between those two spheres, can and should be debated impersonally.
This thread is not the place to raise old ghosts, settle scores, or “hold people accountable,” nor am I well-disposed toward blasé generalizations about this blog.
Matters concerning everyone are up for debate here, and I thoroughly look forward to resuming our discussion of them.
Peter Paik: “Are you speaking from the view that preaching the benefits of discipline ultimately serves as an ideological support for capitalism - the idea that certain moral values are needed to keep the markets going?”
I might not disagree with this, depending on how it was expressed, but I was referring more specifically to environmental politics, which was used as an example of left politics that required discipline. Within this area, “discipline” as you have expressed it—inward restraints, inner readiness—is generally proposed as an individualist alternative to anything that might interfere with capitalist production. It reaches its final absurd point of gigantism, in which it is easiest to see, in the assertions that Gore should have virtuously refrained from using fossil fuels to fly around the country, rather than do so in order to do political work against global warming. But the same dynamic obtains whenever an activist is made to feel that his or her own personal restraint in resource usage is something that they should be concerned about and spend their time adjusting. A slight shift in mandated ethanol content in gasoline, required MPG, or electrical power plant turbine efficiency produces more actual effect than all of the virtuous use discipline of all the volunteers that has ever occured.
What’s more, the goal of discipline as you have expressed it in this case is to reconcile people to wanting less. I’m not interested in a politics that tells people to be disciplined, as if their desires are to blame for late capitalism, rather than changing the system that they live in so that it can sustain them. People may not be able to have gasoline-powered cars, but what they *want* is mobility, for which the gasoline-powered car serves as a replaceable tool.
“For example, I do not see much difference between force and discipline.”
Force can be implemented without discipline—for instance, the Montreal Protocol, the most successful global environmental accomplishment to date, was not an outgrowth of mass discipline.
“But it is impossible to deny that political power throughout history has often been seized by subjects who were mobilized through discipline. I find it hard to believe that you are rejecting struggles for liberation that have been fought throughout the world against colonial powers.”
Why, are you planning to fight in a struggle for liberation against a colonial power? If so, I wouldn’t stand in your way. But speaking in these terms within this context strikes me as, again, absurd. We’re not arguing about history; we’re arguing about what should be done now, within industrialized countries, for which the lessons of anticolonialist struggle are the wrong lessons. It feels like there’s a romantic fogbank that springs up whenever this is discussed—as if whenever someone starts to talk about the newer forms of mass politics, people say that they’re dissing Che Guevara.
Peter, you write:
While it is easy to praise discipline and morality from the sidelines, is it also not possible that the capacity to restrain one’s appetites might well take on a greater importance in the coming years, since the globe will have to confront scarcities in vital resources as well as grapple with the effects of climate change?
Rich makes a good point here. It is possible that middle and upper-class people will <i>have</i> to consume less in coming years, but whether or not they do will be mediated by political and technological factors (e.g. whether or not alternative-fuel cars become standard) entirely separate from the vagaries of political, ethical, or literary theory. The idea that there are any political gains to be had right now, from some arbitrary disciplinary regimen, has to be argued without recourse to speculation about the future.
There’s nothing wrong with environmentally responsible living; it just isn’t a qualification for general political leadership, nor is it responsive to the reasons behind consumerism.
Later on: But actual power is something that can only be attained and exercised through discipline, is it not?
Of course. But I agree with Rich that a certain lack of clarity seems to obtain here. Barack Obama and John Kerry are both, presumably, disciplined people, but neither are radicals. If I forego my morning coffee, or a new iPod, that’s not going to catapult me into the national spotlight. I agree that people should not become completely distracted by entertainment culture, but (as I suggest in my second post) telling overworked people to be more disciplined is hardly short of insane. (I’m not only talking about the white-collar employee with the 60 hour week; I’m talking about the person working 70+ hours a week at two jobs.) We should be asking after their unhappiness.
Adam R. writes:
I thought the whole appeal of a Lacanian perspective is that it avoids, or at least complicates, that reductive, one-to-one mapping: that idea that Freud is the key to unlock a stable meaning from all mysteries—to read, rather, for the very uncertainties and insecurites of the way signification happens. Not to tabulate symbols, but to explore the way meaning resists and overturns symbolisation.
One of the worst things about Zizek’s review is that he recognizes 300 for the sort of film that deliberately erases uncertainty and insecurity. He calls it a “perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament,” meaning the fabular absence of complexity, and then endorses it.
Conrad writes:
Plutarch was at pains to correlate the peaceful state of his Greece with the strong regulation of Spartan society--and the obvious comparison here is Plato.
It’s great to have the link to his dialogue, although it is less eloquent than his Lives. An easy correlation of Lycurgus, Plutarch, and Plato would be an error; typically Plutarchian is a line like this: “So it was with language: it changed with the times, and shared the general break-up.” In other words, while Plutarch has an easygoing respect for the new plain style, he sees it as historically rather than universally determined. Lycurgus did not write any of his laws down, because he felt that doing so would corrupt them, so he certainly cannot be accounted the father of a prosaic law code. Also, according to Plutarch, was Lycurgus did was only justified because Sparta was under siege, and even then what happened the Helots was offensive. Plutarch was deeply faithful to history and locality, and did not attempt to choose between Lycurgus and Numa.
Bill, I agree with you; presumably, discipline and passion are merged in every work of successful art.
"Barack Obama and John Kerry are both, presumably, disciplined people, but neither are radicals.”
To go in an even more anti-discipline direction, anarchists like Bob Black have proposed various versions of the anti-work society, in which all socially necessary activities are done as a form of play. “Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.” (from The Libertarian As Conservative). Actually, if I’m going to cite BB, I might as well let him rant for a while:
Only upon the firm foundation of factory fascism and office oligarchy do libertarians and Leninists dare to debate the trivial issues dividing them. Toss in the mainstream conservatives who feel just the same and we end up with a veritable trilateralism of pro-work ideology seasoned to taste.
Hospers, who never has to, sees nothing demeaning in taking orders from bosses, for “how else could a large scale factory be organized?” In other words, “wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself.” Hospers again? No, Frederick Engels! Marx agreed: “Go and run one of the Barcelona factories without direction, that is to say, without authority!” (Which is just what the Catalan workers did in 1936, while their anarcho-syndicalist leaders temporized and cut deals with the government.) “Someone,” says Hospers, “has to make decisions and”—here’s the kicker—“someone else has to implement them.” Why?
Bob Black has had his own sort of De Man moment since then (note: anarchist sleepovers are sometimes problematic), but I still find his writing entertaining and interesting.
Peter, you might want to read this article as an example of well-meaning but in my opinion completely wrongheaded focus on teaching restraint in individual consumption. Its untested thesis; “We believe that over-consumption lies at the heart of the environmental crisis, that environmental education must teach consumption control, and that ultimately we can help preserve biodiversity and our own environmental welfare by changing our consumption patterns.” But from there the article becomes, subtly, incoherent. For instance, it claims that a central purpose of environmental education should be to change individual consumption behavior, despite lack of evidence that long-term behavioral changes of this sort can be made from the amount of environmental education possible. Actually, the article cites a factoid that only 20% of the U.S. is scientifically literate, so we can see where it’s going. The widespread failure of education for more-basic scientific literacy means that environmental education to change consumption is a strategy for the upper-middle class. Whatever the concentration of wealth in this class, their individual consumption is not so much greater per-capita that this would have any large effect, even if successful.
In particular, there’s a jump from the environmental banality to a solution that doesn’t address it. For example: “As countries develop, their environmental footprint may expand, and consumption control may become more important. For instance, the recent rapid growth in China has increased the demand for wood, steel, and fossil fuels throughout the world. Unchecked, such growth is simply unsustainable and will have a profound negative effect on the global environment. Thus, we need to radically overhaul curricula to teach the conservation of consumable products.” Do the authors anticipate that they will be able to produce Chinese curricula, and have them taught in order to change the behavior of people whose consumption restraint has been based on necessity? Good luck. I believe that with enough judicious indoctrination, they could perhaps teach people to buy smaller cars; I don’t believe that they could keep a family from buying its first-ever car.
And the article shows no awareness of how environmental education actually works. It faults environmental education’s “historical focus on teaching respect of nature” as insufficient. But earlier, the article grudgingly goes through a list of environmental victories—all legislative. Where do they think that legislative victories come from? The authors write: “But these largely legislative victories cannot properly test the effectiveness of environmental education, because they fail to measure directly the impact of environmental education on individual behavior.” The *vote* is the primary impact of environmental education on individual behavior.
If you can’t convince someone to take the action of changing their vote to elect environmentally friendly politicians, then you can’t convince them to take consumption restraint actions which, after all, require more personal effort on their part. But if you can get them to vote, it turns out that you don’t need to do anything else. The natural area of communal action that affects the individual consumption of everyone in a democracy is through legislation. It’s easier to push up the fleet MPG requirement then convince everyone who formerly would have bought an SUV not to. You can have insufficient power to put through the legislation that you want—but in that case, you certainly will not be able to put through a universal environmental education curiculum that changes behavior either.
Rich,
Thanks so much for the reference. I’ll have a look and get back to you about it.
> less eloquent than his Lives.
Well, not in my opinion: the Delphic Dialogues are for me his most beautiful and unusual works.
> An easy correlation of Lycurgus, Plutarch, and Plato would be an error
This seems a too-easy and unjustified rebuke. I never suggested an ‘easy correlation’; but it is undeniable that Plato was interested in the Spartan ‘timocratic’ constitution, and that Plutarch, a Platonist, likewise extolled golden-era (Lycurgan) Sparta.
> Lycurgus did not write any of his laws down, because he felt that doing so would corrupt them, so he certainly cannot be accounted the father of a prosaic law code.
I never said “father of a prosaic law code”. But listen to Plutarch: “The laws of Lycurgus purported to be utterances of the Delphic oracle, and were called rhetra.” / “Now comes the strongest instance: the statutes by which Lycurgus regulated the Lacedæmonian constitution were given to him in prose.”
> Plutarch was deeply faithful to history and locality
To a historically unusual degree, yes. But Plutarch also sees language as indicative of society (or at least related to it in a more complex way), and trans-historical associations, as befit an essentially Platonic mind, are evident throughout his writing.
Rich (and Joseph),
I just finished reading the article on environmental education in the middle of grading student papers. Rich, I think that your comments in your recent posts are based on a distinction that I do not accept. Correct me if I am wrong, but your critique of discipline (or of the preaching discipline) seems to be based on the perception that legislation is more effective and necessary than education. But, how is it possible to have one apart from the other? Education, for better or worse, makes us more receptive to certain ideas and courses of action over others. Law-givers are necessarily educators, and, given that this is a site dedicated to literature, one could go so far as to say that the poets (again, education) are the legislators of the world - an idea pursued with tremendous rigor and visionary insight by Giambattista Vico.
Separating legislation from education is to force an artificial divide between theory and practice. Granted that the academic Left has sought to bridge this divide since the 1960s with rather regrettable consequences, turning much of the country against them the more radical their positions have been, I will resort to a different set of analogies.
“But if you can get them to vote, it turns out that you don’t need to do anything else.”
Isn’t this a bit like saying that because artillery, airpower, and rifles kill Nazis, the US and the UK should never have wasted their time expounding the differences between the Nazi state and liberal democracies, choosing instead to train their soldiers in killing techniques only?
I used to watch hockey a lot when I had cable, and one thing that always struck me was how much the rhythm of the game was dictated by the seemingly small things that the players did in hustling after the puck, even when it did not appear necessary to do so. Going above and beyond did not lead in most cases to a goal, but the price of not fully expending one’s energies was to miss vital opportunities to score. The same thing is true with practically every significant human endeavor. No one truly succeeds by doing only what is minimally necessary. As they say of heavily-favored teams being beaten by the underdog: ‘They are losing because they are playing not to lose.’
Now I am not an expert in the area of environmentalism, but rather an interested amateur. Perhaps there is a secret plan afoot that bypasses the matter of education in order to institute a new set of laws that will meet all our future needs. But such a plan would hardly be democratic, would it not?
Which brings me to the issue of China. I read a story a few years back (I think in Harper’s) about ecologically sustainable housing developments - in Sweden, a free Western social democracy, it took months before an eco-village could be filled with residents. In China, which does not grant its citizens the same degree of freedom, these units were filled right away, by government fiat. One of the challenges of green politics is that authoritarian states might well be better positioned to implement them. Cuba (see Bill McKibben’s excellent piece, “The Cuba Diet,” again in Harper’s) managed to avoid state collapse by developing a sustainable agricultural system after the collapse of the USSR. In Hayao Miyazaki’s film _Princess Mononoke_, the defenders of the forest (against a utopian, revolutionary human community) are animal gods, who can be regarded as standing in for the aristocracy and its martial values.
I’m not saying that there is an immediate, transitive relationship between legislation, education, and personal discipline, but I think that we have an excellent example of how these things can be coordinated in the recent history of the political Right. Think of how much of the country has become habituated to the belief that privatization is the best way, that government is the enemy, etc. These beliefs were instilled in the public by disciplined people who did not enjoy political favor, but kept pushing forward from the cultural wilderness until they could sweep into power once the liberal establishment had played out its hand. In the absence of political legitimacy, the Right focused on education through its think tanks, and those who experienced the humiliation of Goldwater’s defeat and the disappointment of Nixon’s detente prepared the ground for the dominance of conservatism in the latter decades of the century. Is it too much to suggest that the Right had a level of fervor approaching that of revolutionaries engaged in anti-colonial struggles, or that their commitment was in any case closer to the vaunted Che than that of the Left in the US? That the problem with the Left has been its inability to recognize that politics is a form of war, a form of war which need not spill over into actual violence, but in which discipline is a decisive and crucial factor?
Conrad,
The general assertions you make about Plutarch are certainly right: he was influenced by Plato, and he did greatly admire the Spartans. That said, his peculiar literary genre --the short-form, moral biography—enabled him to be more complex than other descendants of Plato without self-contradiction. Throughout the Lives, Plato shows up as a revered teacher, a useful friend, and a philosopher of consoling and improving power. Nonetheless, he is overshadowed by “great men” like Pericles and Alexander. This rhetorical circumstance separates him from Plato. We reap the benefits, because rather than lumping Plutarch in with self-loathing Athenians like Plato, we can think with him, in our own time, according to the pragmatic standards that he would have endorsed. None of this obviates the influence of Plato; it merely allows us to apply Plutarch’s philosophical insights to contingent situations less dogmatically.
Peter (and Rich),
There seem to be two questions in play here: first, whether important political goals, like environmental protection, require a personal commitment or not; second, whether discipline plays any sort of exceptional or decisive role in contemporary politics.
From the standpoint of activism, I am much more in favor of passing laws and encouraging voting, than I am in favor of “moral” campaigns that encourage people to regulate their own conduct. Such campaigns are a convenient substitute for expensive or controversial government commitments that make a real difference, and they have an unpleasantly invasive logic.
That said, it is obviously not the case that environmentalism can default to a set of regulations. First of all, I am not prevented from committing a murder by the fact that there are laws against doing so. Second, every kind of bureaucracy, legal system, and organization survives by constantly breaking its own rules, as anybody who’s had a good conversation with a customer service representative knows. Such conversations always begin, “Sir, there’s nothing we can do about your problem...”. Finally, the law moves slowly. The idea that someone would simultaneously work for the passage of a chlorofluorocarbon law, and drink out of a styrofoam cup, is (in any preventable instance) mere hypocrisy.
***
In my opinion, the decline of progressive politics since the 70s is the result of ideological fractures, ideological contradictions, and rhetorical defeats. The American Left has had a difficult time defining its strategy towards the poor and towards people of color. It has had little coherent to say about the proper role of the corporation in American life. Finally, at least as far as the Democratic Party is concerned, it has been so dismissive of radical leftist critique (e.g. Marxism) that it has never been able to use its radical wing to pull the whole discourse left. The Right, on the other hand, has been very coherent in its approach towards corporate America, very strategic in its use of the far right, and very deliberate and manipulative in its references to race and class.