The apparatus of the nation-state is thus both essential to the existence of capital, as well as in constant contradiction to such, both in the sense of regulating local or private interests for the sake of the system as a whole (legislative agencies and court systems), as well as the creation of specialized semi-autonomous fields (the realm of the political, academic, scientific, symbolic, etc.) increasingly exempt from the direct play of the market forces. It is the harmonization of these two tendencies, i.e. a transcendent capital-logic and an immanent cultural logic of capital respectively, which particularly interests us here; in marked contrast to the medieval canons of reciprocal familial obligations, the hieratic tenets of the Church or the political jousts of the nobility vis-à-vis the Absolutist monarchies, the 18th century revolutions did not need to incarnate or symbolically represent their claim to universality. Rather, the revolutionary process directly embodied this universality, in the same sense that the capitalist nation-state did not accidentally stumble upon its universal content, but was this content. The state produced the nation, but the nation also produced the state, everywhere from the Napoleonic levee en masse and the civic republicanism of the British Empire to the popular mobilizations of revolutionary America. The shocking but irresistible conclusion Adorno draws from this is that Kant's post-Absolutist morality is the legislative prehistory of English-metropolitan nationalism.
It is precisely here, where one would expect either the pithy denunciation of these nationalisms (their subsequent transformation into the Napoleonic wars of plunder, British imperialism and the American frontier annexations) or the whole-sale dismissal of the Kantian categories as the extinguished and irrelevant thought-forms of a decadent bourgeoisie, that Adorno unexpectedly asks us to pause for a moment and to think nationalism through from quite a different perspective: namely, that of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's concepts were meant to negate Absolutism's notorious claim of "L'etat, c'est moi" [I am the state] with the insight that the bourgeois self is organized very much like a miniature state, with rulers (the superego) and the ruled (the id), a process of legitimation (the mediating ego), and a complex symbolic economy (cathexes) predicated on the psychic accumulation of pleasure (the Trieb or drive) - the photographic negative, in short, of the turn-of-the-century Hapsburg civil society of Vienna, whose latent contradictions (a decaying monarchy just barely recontaining the claims of budding nationalisms) could be registered in micrological form.
(chp 4, thesis, Dennis Redmond)
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Dennis, you are probably sick of this, but I want to use it to spin off a few riffs on my favorite themes, art and revolution.
What is missing in this turn from the extreme of an exterior and theoretical view of a meta-narrative of history, into the intimate psychic structures of interiority is an explication or explaination of just exactly how such turns are made possible. How does a society construct its subjects? (Whip and shame bearing Moms?--hi Kelley) The answer is through its arts. These are both the expression of its subjects and the means to construct them. Of course, the word, arts, is just an abrievation for the totality of cultural forms and expressions and is not limited to any one of them.
While I go along with this part:
``The triumph of capitalism thus involves not just an objective or diachronic set of revolutions, though these are hardly unimportant, but subjective and synchronic ones as well: the conscience registers, in a particularly acute form, the most profound and far-reaching spatialization of subjects previously delimited to the temporal registers of familial or hieratic allegiances. The seismic eruption of national capital out of its proto-national, regional and urban predescessors was, in short, the zero-hour of an identity-politics of the national subject.''
I don't actually subscribe to its premise:
``Adorno will push this insight further, noting that to the extent that the superego is merely the identification of the ego with patriarchal authority, it is simply the imprint of social domination, i.e. identical to the mandate of the juridical sphere; it is only where the ego differentiates itself from this identity (in Sartrean terms, that point at which the subject attempts to mobilize the law as a practico-inert in the context of a given project) that anything like a genuine subjectivity can come into existence.3 Not the monumentalized superego but the free-floating, quicksilver realm of the conscience - that specialized psychic space of reflection wherein the contradiction between individual desires, wishes and needs and the prevailing social order and its repressive norms can be registered in the first place - is the true reservoir of subjectivity ("Das Gewissen ist das Schandmal der unfreien Gesellschaft." [The conscience is unfree society's mark of shame.] ND:272).''
The reason I object, is that it implies that whatever we mean by critical consciousness has been turned into a product of these particular historical moments at the turn of the 18th to 19th Century. In fact, this corresponds to the rise of Romanticism and its long cultural development into the 20th C avantguard. Instead of making these historical, cultural, and economic forces responsible for anything so mysterious as consciousness of identity and its critique, I want to see this tagged instead to the historical and material rise of the resistance against the dominance of a bourgeois sensibility of moderation, reform, orderliness, health, science, and good will (ugh, neoliberalism). It is simply the revolt of the disaffected bourgeois against itself. After all none of the cultural giants of the era where anything other than bourgeois to the core.
However, given that objection as a meta-narrative, their cultural productions (particularly of the Romantics) managed to institutionalize and codify this battle of bourgeois sensibility against itself, and thereby give birth to the tradition of our particular idea of revolt (and therefore give form to its pyschic referants, specifically as a sensibility of revolt). And it is this tradition of revolt that links up the entire spectrum of european cultural icons from Goya and David, Beethoven and Hegel, onto Baudelaire and Courbet, Flaubert, Zola, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and so on--until of course we get to Mann, Adorno, Sartre, et al. Notice also the latter are the re-incarnation of a nineteenth century haute bouregoisie--far more so than any bohemian and working class crew (say from the Beats), who manage to read and write and become culturally literate in the full sense of the phrase. To give this distinction at least a couple of names there are Camus and Genet of course, but several generations from the US say starting with Crane (NYC short stories) and following into the second generation immigrant writers born near the turn of the century (Call it Sleep) and their contemporary black american counterparts (Native Son).
But the formation of revolt and its relation to ``that specialized psychic space of reflection wherein the contradiction between individual desires, wishes and needs and the prevailing social order and its repressive norms can be registered in the first place - is the true reservoir of subjectivity''---all this is quite difficult to pin down in history.
There are plenty of historical predecessors to this arrival in the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Rather than see that particular historical revolt as unique it is possible to explore history through a series of related revolts that seem to come in and around, occasionally precipitate historical transistions. This isn't to say that history is driven by pysche, rather they are comingled as some kind of reciprocal to one another, just as their manifestations as culture, the artifacts themselves are both means and expression. On the other I have no doubt that industrial based Capital and its machinations may have precipitated but definitely intensified the rupture and magnified the extreme dislocation or cultural distance between the bourgois and its malcontents--to the point of forming an almost autonomous and critical class all its own (us for example).
I probably don't go along with Adorno's musical distinctions between say Stravinsky and Schoenberg either, since the former wasn't any less a radical assault, (although louder) on the bourgeois taste of the era than the latter. Trying to measure their relative schizo tendencies seems reachy. Remember these works were composed and performed while the haute bourgeois were still swooning to a formless and bland romanticism in opera, ballet, and concerts (Pucinni, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaniov--`the world's most beautiful music' collection for 9.95). Their visual world was composed in the eclectic mysticism of Gustav Moreau and the exquisitely boring decandence of Art Nouveau--all of which were more concretely reactionary than anything of Stravinsky's. Besides I like Stravinsky's self-destructing rythmatic forms and Bartok's dower quartets. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to listen to the completely insane Schoenberg quartets (1904-36)--but yes they seem prophetic, a kind of horrible presentiment/development of the sort to come or already arrived--perhaps latent in the hyper-rational precepts of modernity. How Adorno gets away with calling Stravinsky schizophrenic, while leaving the 12-tone atonal boys in the rational chair is waay beyond me. For an equally hard to listen to jazz version there is Eric Dolphy's perfectly titled, `Out to Lunch' on a Bluenote re-issue. I just listened to it a week ago (One of the guys in a power chair, young black kid from Richmond is discovering the arts and brings things for the shop to listen to)
I have to say Dennis, I sure like your writing better than Adorno--god what a tedious old fuck. I remember you blamed it all on the translations, but even so. Congress and the national security apparatus can rest easy. The Frankfurt School is very safely locked away from twisting up youthful minds behind a wall of well earned obscurity.
Chuck Grimes
It seems like a slow week on lbo, why not send it in and see?