|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 1: 2000/09/04 Steven Shepard
HIEU 507 once dealt with Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and Sartre. But doing both Heidegger and Sartre was beyond the pale of the possible, and so this term Heidegger will just be "waved at" in the course of our looking at other theorists. Marx has been added because Megill is finishing a book on Marx, The Rationality of Karl Marx: Limits and Lessons of a Theory (Lanham Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). As a philosopher, Marx doesn't fit with the rest of the course. The other three saw themselves as working in a time in which traditional moral values had been placed into crisis. Marx is a pre-crisis thinker; he believed in embedded rationality (the idea that the nonhuman world is fundamentally rational).
Because Hannah Arendt often falls between stools, she is less well known than the other thinkers we shall study. She believes in freedom but is not a liberal, and believes in tradition without being a conservative. She also does not fit disciplinarily. She trained as a philosopher with Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and wrote in the continental philosophical tradition. In anglophone universities, this is usually not recognized as philosophy. She was obsessed by politics, but her humanist perspective and literary style do not fit the analytic type of political theory (e.g., John Rawls).
After being forced out of Germany in 1933, Arendt worked for a Jewish aid agency in Paris. She later fled to New York, where she lived the rest of her life. Her book The Human Condition began as a response to Marx.
One should be careful concerning the reliability of what is to be found on the web. E.g., Microsoft's Encarta is not entirely reliable (Encarta claims that Marx studied at Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, but he never studied at Jena).
Sartre was a gifted writer with a vivid style. He became famous as an existentialist thinker with the publication of Being and Nothingness (1943), but then became something of a Marxist with his extremely difficult Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). According to Simone de Beauvoir, his sometime lover, Sartre wrote the Critique while on amphetamines; perhaps this in part explains its rebarbative quality. In any case, Sartre's work, like Arendt's, does have a direct relation to Marx's. For example, the later Sartre discusses worker estrangement, a Marxian theme (although in observing that estranged workers are prone to seek relief by engaging in sexual fantasy, he adds a rather dark Sartrean twist--for surely the attention devoted to such fantasy will not be devoted to the revolution).
Foucault was a non-Marxian French philosopher, which was an unpopular type of philosopher to be in Paris in the period from 1945 through to 1970 or so (at which point French intellectual began to discover that there had been a Gulag). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault wrote that Marxism exists in 19th-century thought as a fish exists in water--that is, it doesn't fit anywhere else.
Marx's great paradox: he wants to discover predictivity in the world, and he also wants freedom, which is his highest value. But his concern with predictivity worked in such a way as to undermine freedom. This occurred not because he was a "determinist," an old argument that is hardly worth rehearsing any more, but for another, rather more indirect reason, that we shall explore in this course.
Bits and pieces, bits and pieces: Marx had abysmal handwriting. There are a handful of unreconstructed Stalinists working in Moscow for $70 a month doing nothing but deciphering it.
Louis Althusser: shows, according to Megill, that one doesn't have to be stable in order to be a good philosopher.
Reading - first 4 essays in Arendt's "Between Past and Future," also Whelan and Shepard (and maybe someone else) will read Isaac's Democracy in Dark Times, p. 1-58. Is anyone tackling Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, also a good book?
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 2: 2000/09/11.1 John Worozbyt
Introductions
Note: Phone Reserve Desk to change duration of reserve checkouts. [ I have decided not to do this, after speaking with the Reserve Room. AM]
Professor Megill opens the class by referring to correspondence between Hannah Arendt and her mentor, Karl Jaspers (Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969). In one letter (June 3, 1949), Arendt criticizes the American philosopher and cold warrior, Sidney Hook, for characterizing Sartre as a "reluctant anti-Stalinist," a characterization that Arendt finds grossly inadequate (and an indication of Hook's mistaken wish to force everything into the Procrustean bed of Stalinism vs. anti-Stalinism).
Megill drew particular attention to Arendt's and Jaspers's comments on Marx. Jaspers is decidedly anti-Marx, Arendt less so (interesting references on 160, 163, 187, 205). In a letter of December 25, 1950 Arendt agrees with Jaspers's view that Marx, like Plato, had a partiality for rationay tyranny, but praises Marx the revolutionary, "whom a passion for social justice has seized by the scruff of the neck" (160). In a letter of January 7, 1951, Jaspers in response claims that Marx took "all the humane passages" out of Engels's draft of The Communist Manifesto (163). He suggests that Marx's work is "impure at the root" and quite unKantian; he maintains also that Marx is evil, and that Lenin understood him correctly whereas the German Social Democrats did not.
Later, in a letter of May 13, 1953, Arendt writes that "the more I read Marx, the more I see that you were right. He's not interested either in freedom or in justice. (And he's a terrible pain in the neck in addition). In spite of that, a good springboard for talking about certain general problems" (216).
Megill transitions to Marx as subject of current work, namely, The Rationality of Karl Marx: Limits and Lessons of a Theory. Follows with brief outline of the predominance of Heidegger and Jaspers in existential thought in Germany. Jaspers's suspicion of the Nationalist Socialist Party culminates in split between Jaspers and Heidegger.
Added note: Since the class I have been reading a book MS for a university press. It deals extensively with Sartre's intellectual connections from the late 1920s to the 1940s. On Sartre's relation to Marx: Sartre came to Marx later than did some of his contemporaries. Various of his friends attended Alexandre Kojève's seminar/lectures of 1933-39, on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Kojève offered a Marxian-Heideggerian reading of Hegel. Sartre did not attend, and came to Marx only in the mid-1940s, after concluding that his work until that time had been too detached from politics. The author of the MS also suggests that part of the reason that Being and Nothingness (1943) had such a great success in the aftermath of the war was that it enabled its readers to avoid questions of responsibility concerning their actions (or failure to act) during the period of Vichy and of the German occupation of France (1940-44).
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 2 (CONT'D): 2000/09/11.2 Nawreen Sattar
Poesis: = aesthetic creativity, or creativity analogous to aesthetic creativity. The notion of poesis is present in some of our thinkers and in others who influenced them. It is important, for example, in the later Heidegger ( see "The Origin of the Work of Art" and other related works on poetry and language). Perhaps it is present in Arendt, but we shall have to attend to specific texts to see how important it actually is for her. Does she herself invoke the notion to any great degree? Let us attend to this question in subsequent reading.
Praxis: The term is usually applied to actions having some practical outcome in the world (which the poetic work of the artist does not have, at least if we accept a Kantian conception of art, in which art is a matter of "purposiveness without purpose," in other words, without any practical function. There is a classical tradition, usually seen as Aristotelian, in which praxis is taken to be inferior to theory (theoria), which is a supposedly disinterested contemplation of the world.
The action, work, labor distinction in The Human Condition: Action: is a matter of performance, not a matter of producing an object. Work: eventuates in an object, a "work" that persists. Labor: is a matter of producing for consumption, that is, for the sustenance of life. Action and work both seem to have a poetic element to them; labor does not. Part of Arendt's argument against Marx is that he reduces everything to labor.
Discussion of part of Jeffrey Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times. Isaac claims that political theory is detached from the real problems of democracy. Political theorists are triumphalistic about liberal democracy, Isaac claims. They are engaged in research that explores the liberal democratic model, and are inattentive to its problems. Isaac claims that we are living in dark times for democracy. Those who are alienated by this system must be attended to; we ought to think more like Arendt and search for something new. Isaac picks up on Schumpeter, early 1940s, who argues the very weakness of liberal democracy (apathy, alienation etc.) is its strength, since it prevents masses from uniting behind someone like Hitler. Isaac doesn't accept. Liberal democracy is not ok if only half of the people vote. We need to find new ways of addressing this problem.
Megill is not clear about what Isaac wants. Does he merely wish for a higher level of voter participation? Tha's not a very high end to wish for. What is the mechanism of the desired political participation?
Arendt, Between Past and Future: In Chapter 1 (Tradition), Arendt states that the three thinkers (who? name them) illuminate the break in tradition (p26) but does not talk about what caused the break.
Plurality and Natality (Heidegger: humans "thrown into the world") are two central tenets of Arendt. There is no fixed concept of humanity.
Megill: Arendt's view seems to be taht Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard don't cause the break, they are symptomatic of it. Arendt has an underlying theory of society, a tacit conception of what characterizes modern life. Arendt's book Origins of Totalitarianism should answer our question, but it doesn't give what we expect: i.e. the origins of totalitarianism.
Her letters do provide an answer: she does not want to give a causal account of history, because she prefers discontinuity to continuity, and this is because she does wants to highlight the possibility for human action.
We see this when we study the History essay. She values immortal actions in history (Herodotus). Great actions are great intrinsically, if placed in causal chain it loses greatness. (BPF p. 41). If you have a historical process laid out in a web of explanations, everything great is destroyed. Everything explicable is not worth remembering. That's why Arendt is not going to explain great events.
Megill: History essay is the key to understanding Arendt.
Freedom Essay is connected to History Essay.
p.45 BPF Ulysses: There was no Ulysses until invented by Homer. The deepest human motive for history is to lay the possibility of great actions. History recognizes great action.
Ulysses is a political actor. He thwarts the Gods and creates a space for reason. (Book by Jon Elster: Ulysses and the Sirens; a great title, that.) The rowers are the alienated workers, Horkheimer and Adorno suggested.
Ulysses/Odysseus: denies desire, creates art.
Parallel: Mar's use of Prometheus who defies the gods and gives fire to man to become the founder of technology. (Prometheus and the Vampires: another great title).
BPF p. 48: Greeks: greatness equals immortality; nature is cyclical and eternal; man lives up to nature. Post Renaissance: Both the world and humanity are mortal and futile. The species (????) are immortal.
There are two sides to Marx: the theoretical and the activist. Example:
Theoretical: Preface to Second German Edition of Capital: the immanent laws of capitalism work themselves out with iron necessity.
Activist: Marx's work of political organization and his calls for revolution.
Arendt: A necessitarian conception of human history is anti-action, Arendt holds.
Reading: Marx Early Writings (syllabus). Some people will do some reading from : Dana Villa, Megill's politics, historical process chapter in mydocsonline.com.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 3: 2000.09.18.1 Jeff Michalowski
-Class note-takers should e-mail Megill the minutes in Wordperfect 5.1, and nothing higher.
-The Marx of the Early Writings (through 1844), though distant from the popular Marx, contains seeds of his essential arguments. Althusser claimed that a radical epistemological shift separated the revolutionary early Marx from the more scientific Marx of the German Ideology through Capital, but virtually no one accepts Althusser's argument. There were shifts, but there was no radical break.
Megill suggested somewhat facetiously that "it was all there" (though disclarified and undeveloped) by November 10-11 1837, in a letter from Marx to his father. Although one can certainly find contradictions in Marx's work, the contradictions tend not to be contradictions between, say, Marx in 1844 and Marx in 1867; rather, they tend to be contradictions that were present in Marx's thought throughout. Of course there were changes in Marx's positions after 1844, but what is most striking is the continuity between the early Marx and the later Marx.
A digression: relevant to later material:-Heidegger, who influenced Sartre, Arendt and Foucault, was made known to the French intellectual community in part through Alexander Kojève's lectures of 1933-1939. The lectures were primarily a Heideggerian-Marxist interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojève, influenced by Husserl's attempt to get past the Cartesian split which estranges the subject from the object, asssumed that the Phenomenology of Spirit presents an account of the development over time of a subject embedded in the world. This is in large measure a misreading of the work--although a highly interesting misreading.
In the "Lordship and Bondage" section, Hegel presents a conflict between two archetypal characters, the lord and the bondsman (sometimes rendered as master and slave), emphasizing 1)struggle, 2)recognition, 3)desire, 4)need. It is not likely that Marx was influenced by this section. In the Early Writings, he doesn't mention the lord/bondsman dialectic, nor does he do so in any other writing, to Megill's knowledge. Kojève offers a Marxian interpretation of the Phenomenology, but it is certainly not Marx's interpretation. Nonetheless, Kojève interestingly identified a very Marx-like bit of the Phenomenology, and later in the semester someone ought to give us a sumary of it.
It is often said that Marx turned Hegel upon his head. Megill suggests that this is misleading, and a more appropriate metaphor would hold that Marx plays the switchman, pushing Hegel along a slightly different path.
In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," Marx states: "This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species."
Marx, here, suggests that he is neither a materialist nor an idealist. We can infer that he means that he is not an ontological materialist (as opposed to the Engels of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific), for it is clear that he was a materialist in the historical sense. Marx did not concern himself with questions concerning the fundamental nature of the universe; he was a theorist of the human world interested in human society.
Why does Marx show such hostility toward the market? There are a number of reasons. First, it is connected to estrangement. But the market doesn't cause estrangement; rather it is a manifestation of it, as reflected in the "Estranged Labor" section. Megill postponed telling us the other reason, though I really wanted to know.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 3 (CONT'D): 2000.09.18.2 Katie Dirks
Professor Megill highlighted the significance of the order of the writings in the excerpts we read from Marx's Early Writings. It was first thought that Marx's excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy preceded his "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts." In this case, the excerpts from Mill would have led up to Marx's first articulation of the estrangement of labor. In fact, the essay on Mill came after the manuscripts, which alters how we read the development of his thought on estranged labor.
A question was raised about the role of hypothesis in Marx's discussion of estranged labor. Megill emphasized that the conditional mode is important in the reading. Marx starts from the premises of political economy, he explicitly say (p. 322); his conclusion (estranged man) follows from these premises. In large measure, Marx is making a deductive argument here.
Starting from the premises of political economy, we find different modes of estrangement. But first, Megill made a clarification between estrangement and alienation. Though they are essentially the same, they have different words in German. Entäusserung (rendered in this translation as "alienation") suggests "externalization"; Entfremdung, rendered in this translation (and in most other translations) as "estrangement," although it, too, is sometimes translated, confusingly, as "alienation) suggests "foreignization."
The four types of estrangement are estrangement from the product, estrangement from the act of production (from any and all acts of production), estrangement from "species-being [Gattungswesen]", which really means estrangement from the potentialities to be found in human nature, and estrangement of man from man.
Marx holds, variously, that the essence of man is labor, freedom, or activity. The terms clearly overlap in large degree, for Marx. In a sense, Marx is a Fichtean. Fichte stressed activity in his writings. Action, according to Fichte, is the defining feature of human beings. In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" Marx writes that man makes activity an object of his will and consciousness. He masters his material needs by action (unlike an animal, who is subject to natural determination). If we have freedom, we have met our basic physical needs, and can rise above them.
Of the four types of estrangement, which one causes the others? Marx writes that private property appears as the basis and cause of alienated labour (p. 332). He goes on to say, though, that private property is in fact a consequence of alienated labor. Our alienation from the act of labor alienates us from the product of labor. Private property is nothing more than exchange. If an object cannot be exchanged (e.g. a worthless coat), then it is not truly property. Private property and division of labor presuppose each other, and are mutually implicated in a circular relationship. There is no market unless there also exists a division of labor, and no division of labor without a market that makes it possible and calls it forth.
Marx claims that we are estranged from our product only because we are estranged from the act of production. Therefore, the root of the problem is not market, but rather estranged activity. But these concepts are mutually implicated. How possible is it to find a primary cause? Are causal claims possible in Marx's economic theory? He does establish interrelations, but they are conceptual more than explanatory.
Does historical materialism--the dialectic--give us answers about causality? The dialectic is an argument among philosophers that makes conclusions about how knowledge moves forward. Hegel only looked at ideas and philosophy. Marx's explanation of history projects Hegel's discussion of philosophy onto historical economic development. Marx appears to make causal statements, but causal statements imply counterfactuality, and there is no counterfactuality in Marx at this level, it appears.
Marx appears to hold that our estrangement from other human beings occurs because we have not developed our full human potential; thus estrangement of man from man appears to be the consequence of each pesons estrangement from his (her) own species-being. For Marx, private property and exchange are merely secondary, it seems. One must question, then, why Marx is so obsessed with the abolition of private property.
Marx is unconcerned with equality as such . He criticizes Proudhon for focusing on the equalization of wages. He remarks that the advance of production produces a "wealth of needs" for men, opening up needs that did not exist before. He also criticizes the production of needs that has the aim of subordinating other human beings to the power of the capitalist. Yet he holds clearly that some production actually confirms our powers and other human beings (p. 358). With the presence of private property, we strive to increase others' needs, thereby increasing our own production and capital. Under capitalism, all production of goods produces estrangement. Under communism, one would not be alienated from the act of production.
According to Marx, human beings will eventually become free from merely physical need. This could occur only from the new levels of industry and production that have allowed us to transcend meeting our immediate needs. And if we change the current system to one of communism, we will continue to meet our immediate needs, other needs will increase, and these will be met as they arise and develop--a road to a better future.
Thus the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" continually tie estrangement to the activity of production. Marx describes the whole of world history as the creation of man through labor. Religion, family, the state, art, etc., are all particular modes of production. They come under the same laws as the modes of production. In the future (with communism), politics is abandoned. There will be a state, but not a political state. It is therefore the abolition of politics. In his Mill essay, Marx criticizes Adam Smith, for whom everything is economic and commercial. For Marx, in the future everything will not be commercial, but all will be economic. He is taking laissez-faire to its extreme--there will no government. One student raised the question: in communism, is it truly all economics? Or is it pure, non-political society? We still struggle in the future, but we struggle with nature, not with man or with forces of production. Human still strive to meet their needs, but these needs become more refined. One could refer to this state as post-scarcity anarchism.
Note: At some later time I may say something about the terms "socialism" and "communism." For the moment, suffice it to say that they are pretty much interchangeable insofar as their meanings are concerned. For tactical reasons, at different times Marx and Engels preferred one term over the other. In the EPM, the preferred term is "communism," which Marx seems to want to use to distinguish his position from the "socialist" positions of other theorists of the time. In "orthodox" Marxism, the claim was put forward that Marx in his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" distinguishes fairly sharply between socialism, a first stage of communism in which people were to be paid according to their work, and a later stage in which people were to be paid according to their needs. Stalin and others used this distinction to justify wage differentials in the USSR, claiming that the USSR was socialist and not yet communist. However, a sharp distinction between the two actually has little or no support in Marx's texts. AM
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 4: 2000.09.25 Naureen Malik
Dana Villa: Andrew Starner outlined the three important aspects of Heidegger and
Arendt as: (1) Man's disclosive relation to being- (to then somehow be enlightened?); (2) Will to mastery; (3) Alienation of modern subject. [I don''t understand. AM]
Villa evokes three groups that have some relation to Arendt's work: participatory democrats, critical theorists, and communitarians. Arendt is not a member of any of these groups but she does embrace characteristics of each.
Foucault:
In the late 18th-early 19th century there was a mutation of the system of punishment. Whereas once punishment was utilized for retribution through torture, it evolved to become a way to train the body for labor so that it may benefit society. This institution, like all institutions, is the result of individual pieces of work, or anomalies, that are built up. Ultimately, there is a discontinuous movement from one paradigm to the next, suggesting the shifts in paradigms is almost a qualitative change. In a primitive society, individuals are guiding other individuals. The rise of the Colquhoun [?] society, aka age of panopticism,
restructured the penal institution where set guards could look into every cell and monitor everyone. Eventually, these guards would not be needed for the majority of the population, because it would be conditioned with this concept of watching and being watched that the body itself would look into the self and measure the self to society. Thus, this form becomes so institutionalized that it is internalized and external guards are no longer needed for surveillance. Foucault explains that this transformation of the focal point of the penal institution was not linked to a *moral perception,* rather it was a deliberate attempt by the movers and the shakers of society to impose some sort of control at the advent of industrialization.
Over the course of his career, Foucault underwent several shifts of focus and approach. Discounting is very earliest work, these might be seen as:
Stage One: History of Madness- talking about subject. Mad people subjected to psychiatry and preceding forms of treatment, manifested in instruments of repression. Madness, Foucault says, is absence of work. Mad people are silenced- like German tours in Naran Ships, or ship of fools.
Stage Two: Order of Things and Archeology of Knowledge mark the shift to high intellectual history, completely losing sight of the fools. Archeology of Knowledge is entirely schematic theorization of knowledge.
Stage Three: Birth of Prison deals mainly with power and the continued interest in systems of knowledge.
Stage Four: With his work on sexuality, he arrives back at a point near to where he started, at the subject. However, his subject is not madness, but "us" and our relationships to our own souls. Foucault died while he was in the process of exploring this topic.
There is a shift even between Foucault"s Order of Things (1966) and Archeology of Knowledge (1969). He also apologizes for "waffling around" from 71-71, where he was not sure how to proceed. In 1975, Birth of Prison marked a focal shift, but not a high intellectual one as in Order. In 1976, History of Sexuality turned out to be very different from what he had originally planned to write. By the early 1980s, he is talking about the subject. In 1982, Foucault argued that he was not doing a history or ontology, not what Heidegger did in Being in Time, rather he is writing about the "historical ontology of ourselves."
Foucault talks about power knowledge in interview conducted from 1972-1977. Megill says that Foucault reminds one of Marx. Rather he is the anti-Marx in that power is indistinguishable from knowledge. Foucault, in reference to John Howard, alludes to classes vaguely, but not specified in society. Where the power is located, he does not specify the state of power nor what it is. Foucault is particularly fascinated by scientific knowledge. A question posed is how can the science of knowledge be used to explain power relations? The evocation of scientific knowledge harps back to Foucault"s own experiences while working in a mental hospital in France. Science legitimizes, or claims to, legitimize power. By 1980s, power is drops out of the equation because Foucault realizes it is an "empty tag." Instead, he talks about relationship of our selves, like the care of ourselves, where power is implied, but not made explicit. Foucault is criticized by many for having a conception of power that is too broad- where everything is power. If everything is power, then how can it mean anything? (This is a left, radical dangerous critique). We are left only to ask and contemplate whose power is it?
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 4 (CONT'D): 2000.09.25 Andrew Starner
Megill made it clear that Hegel is NOT an abstract thinker; he is concerned with the particular ('The reading of the daily newspaper is the morning prayer of the realist.')
Foucault tape: Hegel intended his History as an exhaustive description/construction of the world, and with it history was complete [at any rate, that's what Hegel seems to be saying about the history of philosophy]. According to Foucault, for Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as for other thinkers, the question is 'What are we today?' Adn this is what especially interests Foucault.
According to Foucault, since Kant there have been two forms of philosophy. One deals with what is, in general, true and poses such questions as How do we know the Truth? The other is more concerned with the actual world, and asks, What are we? The analytical ontology of truth opposes the historical ontology of ourselves and of our actuality.
We learn that for Foucault the present is characterized by CRISIS. Foucault has been influenced (or impressed) by Heidegger and a certain Christian millenarian tradition. But unlike traditional thinkers, he does not see humanity at being, now, at the nadir of a certain process, where, in the darkest point of darkness, in the depth of the night, the promise of dawn lies.
In Foucault's view we must recover our past (in effect to recover what has been forgotten since the beginning of History). But we don't need to return to the radical origins to analyze what we are. Historical ontology of ourselves engages in the analysis of our recent past. Thus, crisis isn't an abyssal moment, following on a better, nostalgically-perceived past; rather, Foucault teaches that every moment of our life is a crisis, or rather that every moment has to become a crisis as a result of interrogation. This is our intellectual duty; to introduce the crisis in what we believe, in what we think, in what we do, and in what we are.
Unfortunately, a rationale for self-interrogation simply doesn't exist: it is what I, Foucault, do, and what I call everyone to do. It is a species of aesthetic craftsmanship, certainly not producing something useful (reminiscent of Heidegger's notion of existence-through-one's-projects; further, the artfulness and creativity of Foucault's project(s) are borne out in the descriptions of his courses at the Collège de France).
Question: where is Foucault's objectivity? What does he suggest as a replacement for the society he so vehemently and creatively criticizes?
(Megill laughs out loud.) The notion of critic in that sense is utopian- it is not Foucault's. There is an opposition always in Foucault between the norms and values that society cherishes and those which he seeks to destroy. Foucault in this sense seeks to have no values- to escape essentialism and practice a species of HYPER-CONTINGENCY. It is a normative vision of society, but not a narrowly prescriptive one.
Question: What is our relation to Truth? How ought we act in society?
The process of interrogation is the course we should follow--to embrace subjectivity and exist within it. The intelligent being makes crisis. This is Foucault's Ethics. The concern with ethics is an examination of orientation-towards rather than any articulation of his own. Again, Foucault doesn't offer a constructive ethics, but rather a destructive one. He seeks to problematize social interactions, but there doesn't appear to be any motive beyond this. Foucault has NO vision of a liberated society. (Where someone like Marcuse believes in this liberation, this process in which society is to be broken down and conventions altered to permit, say, homosexuality, in a delightfully polymorphic perversity that will allow everyone to be happy at last [Happy at last, happy at last, Lord God in heaven, happy at last], Foucault has no such wondrous vision.)
The quote 'il n'y a pas de plage sous les pavés' is a good illustration of this belief; the process of pulling paving stones out of the street and hurling them at authority does not end in the discovery of a beach beneath. We do not search for a generic good life, but rather engage in resistance. The 1968 student revolt in the streets of Paris occasions some of this thought, much like the revolutions of 1848 condition Marx's 18th Brumaire, but this is Marx WITHOUT a vision of a positive future.
We also discussed Foucault and power (relationship as power, or power in relationships), especially with regards to the discursive practice of demarcation, definition, and articulation of norms for theories, etc. This an instance of the inherent inertia of tradition as embodied in institutional knowledge. Certainly, power obscures distinctions: an anecdote detailing the career of the uninspired mathematician and unoriginal philosopher Christian Wolff who manages to become a member of the British Royal Society abnd of the Prussian Academy by virtue of his standing vis-à-vis Liebniz and Newton explored the potential for preferential power or ostracism. Of course, Megill notes, ultimately, for theory-articulators, it is the predictive power of the theory that is important. Elegance and economy, also.
This leads to questions of authority and expertise that are tied in with the status and purpose of the intellectual. According to Foucault, there are no universal intellects any longer. There are experts in certain fields and there are critical intellectuals (eg, SARTRE). Marx can be a general intellect, but not so Foucault, and while he claims that the intellectual is the spokesman of the world, 'the conscienceless conscience of us all,' he is very reticent about voices his own opinions.
The professor has no right to express opinions, only to disclose his or her research.
[Foucault admits that he is diverted by his research, not in the sense that it amuses him, but rather that it encourages him to think differently about his field, to change directions, to explore what other academics would not approve of. 'I am not a professional philosopher (sometimes historian). Nobody's perfect.' He valorizes LABILITY (radical instability and capacity to change or vary).] NOTE: doctoral dissertations with this same characteristic will not be successful. (This is roughly comparable to trapeze act without a net.)
Method saves us from our own stupidity, but not Foucault, who happened to be brilliant. {I am reminded of the early T. S. Eliot, in The Sacred Wood: 'There is no method, except to be very intelligent.'] Foucault is not systematic, and anyone searching for a rigorous methodology will be disappointed. In many ways Derrida shares in this same orientation; he cannot be categorized or pigeon-holed and in the end Mitterand, concerned with promoting one of France's major export products, must find him an appropriate academic position by "persuading" the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales to invent a philosophy department and give him a position in it. Certainly, Foucault could not survive in a normal academy; it was tremendous luck that he should find himself at the Collège de France, in many ways the pinnacle of academia, which has no students and awards no degrees. As such, it was perfect for Foucault. (And he only secured this through his friendship with Boulez and Veyne, and because it seemed appropriate that he be the successor of his former teacher at the lycée Henri IV, Jean Hippolyte.)
Here is an instance of (Academic) power. Foucault was perceived to be a genius (perhaps capable of making mistakes) but above all he was capable of 'talking Hegel' and of destroying Hegel at the same time. Of course, it is 'easier' to become a hyperintellectual in France, where the education system is such that students focus their energies at much earlier age, avoiding the tedium of geography and the contingent shallowing of knowledge.
Here Megill launches into his reminiscence of Foucalt, a man shorter than expected who speaks in timid English. Yet he is resolute and unequivocal. Megill was not surprised, later, to learn that he worked out with weights in his apartment high above the rue de Vaugirard. He claimed to drink nothing but the purest vodka, and that only sparingly; Megill thought that he would live, actively, to an old age. Foucault's recorded response is marked by its simplicity, eloquence, and forceful directness. There was no outward sign of the virus that, twenty months later, would kill him.
Megill suggests that someone explore Foucault's anti-psychiatry (Foucault's interest in the rustle of the speechless mad). Foucault came to the same part as did RD Laing, David Cooper, and Thomas Szasz. Megill points the fiscal motives behind the de-institutionalization that occurred in the sixties and seventies (much cheaper to turn schizophrenics into the street). Foucault had an affinity with the insane and the unbalanced: he himself came close to committing suicide while a young student at the École Normale Supérieure. Perhaps it was only Louis Althusser who saved him. Althusser himself was a manic-depressive, who years later would strangle within the walls of the École itself.
Megill notes the disappearance of bag ladies and beggars from the streets of New York City during a recent visit.
On liberalism: We then explore liberalism as a critical stance, the importance of attacking norms and a critique of government. Thus, we arrive at Foucault's 'problematic vision.' Which stimulates a protracted discussion of Foucault's style and verbal wit. His literary image of the ship of fools, his mirror play in the opening pages of Mots et Choses. We cannot fail to mention the Panopticon or neglect 'le regard' in Sartre's L'Être et le Néant.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 5: 2000.10.02 Sam Ross
AM: (on Sartre) Sartre's work is characterized by a certain directness, which makes him an unusual philosopher. Modern philosophy has been preoccupied with the universal, but Sartre always goes for universals through particulars. This can at times be quite helpful, giving us some context for understanding what concrete point he is getting at. A perfect example of this is his famous "Pierre" example, where Sartre has an appointment with Pierre in a cafe, but Pierre "is not there." Sartre has, here, a radical sense of the absence of Pierre, but he only has that sense because of his expectation of Pierre's being there. Nothingness, through expectation, manifests itself.
Another reason why Sartre is in some ways an atypical modern philosopher is that he has a highly developed literary intelligence.is quite sharply literary-minded.cannot be properly considered a modern philosopher is that he was too literary minded. Later in his life, as essays began to be published about him, he was often distressed that little mention was made of his literary accomplishments. For Sartre was more than a philosophical mind. He was a literary and dramatic mind.
On Nausea: Sartre had difficulty titling "Nausea." Its first title was "Factum on Contingency," a clear loser. Renamed Melancholia, it was finally accepted, though the publisher recommended changing the title to Nausea, surely an inspired choice. It is a brilliant book because of its clarity. A perfect example of this is his illustration of "becoming," as a synthesis of "being" and "nothing." In the famous Pierre example, Sartre has an appointment with Pierre, but Pierre "is not there." As such, Sartre has a radical sense of the absence of Pierre, but he only has that because of his expectation of Pierre. Nothingness, through expectation, gains an appearance.
Question: What is phenomenological ontology?
AM: Near the beginning of Being and Nothingness" is the claim, "to be is to be perceived." Recall Berkeley, the British empiricist, who held that there must be an observer of things and events for them to be said to exist. I.e. "a tree falls in the forest" only if someone is there to see it fall. Berkeley's "out" with regard to things no human sees is that there exists one universal observer, God, who watches over all things at all times.
A convenient distinction for thinking about phenomenological ontology is the phenomenon/noumenon distinction. This comes from Kant. The "phenomenon" are those things we can perceive with our senses. This would include all things governed by natural law (F=ma). This category provides no room for freedom. The other category (the "noumenon") however, does. It includes those things were are imperceptible to the senses--that transcend sense experience and the natural scientific laws that govern the perceptible world.
Sartre of course had no God, so for him there was only the "world-world" in which to operate. Here he was following Husserl, who rejected Kant's phenomenon-noumenon distinction. Rather, Husserl wanted somehow to intuit "the thing itself." It should be noted that Husserl approached philosophy from his mathematical background, hence his obsession with certainty.
Fear vs. Angst: Fear and angst are different and the difference is worth noting. Fear is marked by its specificity. Fear takes an object. But angst is a more general and underlying feeling. And it is through anxiety that we connect most deeply with nothingness. Angst is the underlying state of Dasein's being in the world. (Kafka's Metamorphosis as an example of angst rather than fear)
Potential paper topics with recommendations by Megill indented:
1) Sociology of networks - how networks of intellectuals function
Randall Collins' work
Kristellar on the renaissance
2) The Anti-Psychiatry Movement
Look at Lange and Cooper
History of Madness
Maladie Mentale et Personalite
Le reve et l'existence (Binswanger)
3) Marx's Theory of Revolutions
Chapter 2 from mydocs online
4) Arendt on Revolution
5) Foucault's Ethics
Read Thomas Flynn
6) The concept of the burden in 20th century continental theory
Read Habermass
7) The Marx-Sartre overlap on the topic of alienation
Look at the connection between Sartre and Marx through Heidegger
8) Anthropology and Nationalism
Technologies of the Self
9) Paris as an intellectual base (Foucault - Sartre)
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 5 (CONT'D): 2000.10.02 VINAY JAIN
Annie Cohen-Solal's biography of Sartre is recommended, as it contains interesting photographs and stories. (Sartre had relationships with many women.)
There is, of course, both a literary and a theoretical component to Sartre's project. Part of his philosophy is the notion that by simply putting an action or event into words, one is essentially making it real. Thus, as seen in his memoir of his childhood, Les Mots (The Words), Sartre isn't really concerned about factual accuracy.
Role-playing presents itself as an important theme in his work, and can be seen in his account of the waiter in the cafe (p. 151-153). The waiter is playing a role--the role of a waiter. His attempt to automatize his movements by conducting them in a series of mechanized steps is part of this game. He is role-playing his condition in order to realize it. But he is acting in bad faith, because though he knows he is playing a role, he doesn't know this in the right way--he's lost the distinction between playing the role in his life and playing it as one would on stage.
Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life deals with the disparity between "front stage" and "backstage" life in society. Much of our everyday behavior in our jobs, in our casual friendships, in our families, etc. requires us to play a role. The book examines outward appearance versus reality in such situations.
Of course, our "front stage" appearance cannot be dismissed as mere appearance, because it is part of what we are--we are real on both the front and back stages. But the waiter has lost sight of this, for he is too serious in playing the "front stage" role. One thus gets the sense that he no longer has a real personality. The actor, in such a case, has faded away and disappeared behind his role.
The best symphony performance, some hold, is one in which the specific orchestra performing the work has disappeared--it has faded behind the music (p. 94-95). When we do become aware of the orchestra, it is because some of imperfection that has compromised the performance. This is rather like the individual being lost behind his or her role in society. We are only really aware of the bank teller as anything other than a bank teller, for example, when he makes a mistake in our account.
Kant's aesthetic theory defines art in two ways: as having purposiveness without purpose, and as providing "disinterested," that is, nonsensual, pleasure. Marx, on the other hand, provides a continuum which runs from purely sensual pleasure on one end to pleasure given by art on the other. Marx would regard Kantian aesthetics as ideological, as mistaken, for he would surely have seen it as an attempt to carve out a realm of fulfillment in an imaginary realm, taking us away from the need to transform the real social world.
Sartre's "the World has not created the Me, the Me has not created the World." (p. 57), expresses neither an idealistic nor a materialistic perspective on the world, but acknowledges that the two coexist. There is no transcendental subject, but there is an absolute consciousness. The absurdity of ontological materialism (historical materialism plus metaphysics) is that historical materialism is sufficiently fruitful on its own as a working hypothesis without the metaphysical component.
At every moment, man recreates himself ex nihilo, an effort that is both exhilarating and burdensome (p. 54). On the one hand, man can decide at any moment what he wills to be (e.g., cowardly or courageous). In The Wizard of Oz, for example, each character had the ability to be, instantaneously, that which they had previously sought in vain to be. But the negative part is the burden that lies upon us at each moment to reinvent ourselves as we are--to will ourselves to be the persons we want to be, but are not naturally.
Proust, who wants us to get back to the precious moment of the madeleine, is making a mistaking in trying to freeze that moment, according to Sartre. Sartre says the moment cannot be recaptured, nor ought we to try. Rather, Sartre is taken by the flux of the moment. Dos Passos's ability to capture this flux is why Sartre held him in such high regard.
Sartre writes of the contest between the Self and the Other (p.209-230). Some (e.g. Emmanuel Levinas) have raised the objection that the philosophers' Other isn't really an other, but a kind of alter-ego version of the self. Sartre himself says "Each person is the same as the Others insofar as he is Other than himself." (p. 460)
Otherness is a mirror which provides us a chance to know ourselves--we can only know ourselves by being mirrored, and by coming into conflict with others.
Megill is impressed that Marx envisions a society where there is no envy or greed because there is no need for it. But Sartre makes no such assumptions. Sartre says there will always be scarcity, and thus never harmony between human beings in their social world.
There is no common or collective project in the early Sartre (he tried to correct this error--not very successfully--in his later Critique of Dialectical Reason). His is a highly individualistic world.
Sartre's concreteness and use of specific examples gives some entry into his personality, in contrast with someone like Heidegger, who completely withholds himself from his work.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 6: 2000.10.09 Peter Locke
The Human Condition began as 3 lectures given at Princeton in 1953 on the topic of "Karl Marx and the tradition of political thought;" these were followed in 1956 by a series of lectures at the University of Chicago entitled "Vita Activa." (see HC p.327).
Arendt was the first female full professor (albeit only a visiting full professor) at Princeton, which brought her a great deal of media attention after a student drew this fact to the attention of the press. This modest fame contributed to the success of The Human Condition (the first printing sold out in 4 months).
The book is largely a critical response to Marx; Arendt attacks what she sees as his overvaluing of labor and his undervaluing of politics. She offers no prescriptions for what to do now, and her work cannot be described as traditional political theory.
Question: is Arendt correct in arguing that Marx does not see the labor-work distinction? One might argue that Marx's description of activity under communism differs from "labor."
"Activity" is a key term in the early Marx; some have argued that Marx was a Fichtean (Fichte is described as a "philosopher of activity"), as opposed to a follower of Hegel's emphasis on logos/thinking. (The view of Hegel here is incorrect - he was also a philosopher of activity (see his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy")). Activity is central in Marx - the primary form of estrangement is from the "act."
How does Arendt's concept of "action" relate to Marx's "activity?" Arendt's distinctions are interesting to think with, but difficult to pin down. Arendt argues that labor does not produce things that endure; it merely creates goods which will be immediately consumed to satisfy basic human needs. But labor in Marx's sense does produce things that endure (capital, for example); in fact, for Marx capitalism itself is the product of labor. So, does Marx have a notion of "work," in Arendt's sense?
Marx's "exchange value" as opposed to "use value" is not equivalent to Arendt's "labor" as opposed to "work." Arendt argues that in Marx's thought surplus value is just more labor; Prof. Megill says that she is fundamentally right - for Marx, everything is labor.
Habermas, in an essay on Hegel's Jena philosophy of spirit (available in English in his collection, Theory and Practice, makes the same point (that in Marx there is only labor), and argues that Marx omits "interaction" (ie friendship) and "symbolic representation" (language). Prof. Megill agrees, and points out what he calls Marx's "unitarism," a desire to reduce all categories to one. For example, Marx wants ONE history, while Hegel was content with many. Marx tries to create a dialectical history of everything in the human world, and this history is dominated by "labor." For Marx, the human essence is activity, and activity is labor.
The question is posed again: in Marx's vision of communism, we will be free from labor - doesn't this mean that Marx must imagine a different kind of activity?
On this issue see p.160 in The Marx-Engels Reader (".to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner."). Here labor seems to have become fulfilling. "fun." The image here is a bit like the utopian socialist Charles Fourier's idea that if people are allowed to flit from one occupation to another this will help them to experience the work as enjoyable. Yet in Capital, volume 3, in a famous passage on "the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom," Marx seems to want to reduce the hours of labor, with freedom coming outside those hours (see MER, 439-41). These are irreconcilable positions; but, in defense of Marx, Prof. Megill says that "we have no reason to think that the world is not contradictory."
Prof. Megill refers to an article by R. N. Berki, "On the Nature and Origins of Marx's Concept of Labor," Political Theory 7 (1979): 35-56. Berki finds three conceptions of labor in Marx: labor as oppressive, labor as gratifying or pleasurable, and labor as a vehicle of self-development (it develops human nature and humanizes nature).
We want another kind of activity in Marx - but we don't find it. Marx's description of alienated and unalienated labor in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" doesn't solve the problem. Are there distinctions within labor, for example laboring to survive vs. laboring to fulfill oneself and others? It might be a psychological distinction, a matter of our attitude toward labor - we must willingly labor out of our commitment to the community. This is almost a Kantian approach. It might also be construed as a matter of free gift-giving: see the "Excerpts from James Mill," p.277, Early Writings.
This connects to Arendt's notion that "excellence" is impossible without other people, without political society. Marx, p.278, Early Writings: "Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth." Arendt would argue that such a situation would be impossible without political society - but Marx, committed to notions of rational necessity that could not be reconciled with politics, excluded political society in his vision of the future. Arendt strongly criticizes him on this point. Marx and Arendt diverge significantly in their approach to prediction and necessity; in Margaret Canovan's words, Arendt is "a theorist of beginnings," of new things, which by definition are not predictable.
Question: in Arendt, what exactly is the public realm in which freedom can be exercised? What are the criteria for freedom? p. 198 of The Human Condition: "the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the 'sharing of words and deeds.'" Arendt seems to envision the public realm as a group of peers, focused on a common object, acting and speaking together.
p.57-58: We must know that everyone is concerned with the same thing; the reality of the object arises out of the "sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude of spectators." In mass society, we can't be sure we're looking at the same thing from different perspectives, and so we all take on the same perspective - "each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbor." In Between Past and Future (page reference?), Arendt argues that debate is only possible when there is something fundamental upon which everyone agrees.
p.41: The Greeks individuated themselves in the public realm - "it was the only place where men could show who they really and interchangeably were." In mass society, the public realm becomes homogenous.
Top of p.58: Individuation in the public realm requires shared fundamental principles - there is a balance between the "common object" and "multiple perspectives."
Top of p.183: Acting and speaking must take place within a "'web' of human relationships."
Arendt would oppose Sartre's notion of "creation ex nihilo" (p.54, the Philosophy of J-P Sartre). "Only gods create ex nihilo." Individual action cannot be boundless, because we are born into a common world which we did not create, a web of relationships based on shared fundamental principles. Prof. Megill suggests that Arendt is thinking of "trust and worthiness of trust." Without trust, creativity and individuality in the political realm are impossible.
See pp.236-237: promises and forgiveness make politics possible. What is "political forgiveness," as opposed to forgiveness in intimate relationships? Our actions have unanticipated consequences; we must forgive these consequences for politics to be possible. We may sharply disagree, but in politics these disagreements must be forgiven.
Arendt argues that radical individualism makes everyone the same (see pp.57-58). Prof. Megill distinguishes between "individualism" and "individuality." "Individuality" means plurality of perspectives; this is impossible without a "common substrate." Marx also focuses on individuality, as is suggested by the end of his "Excerpts from James Mill." Marx believes that human beings can work together, subordinating themselves to a common task, and expressing their own particular talents and abilities. The example of the symphony orchestra, referred to in class, which Marx offers in Capital, volume 3, is actually concerned with the need for a symphony orchestra, even under communism, to have a conductor (see Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961]). - Still, Marx would surely have agreed that the individual creativity of the violinist presupposes/requires the orchestra - there is no Isaac Stern without the background orchestra. But whereas for Marx a community of sorts arises in the work context, Arendt surely sees community as a fundamentally political reality.
Question: what is the object of political discourse? The object is the "excellence" of the polis. Is this a matter of total self-referentiality - that is, is the object of politics simply politics? Prof. Megill argues that "social issues" (eg welfare, health care) are discussed in political discourse, but with the objective of developing policies geared toward the excellence of the polis. See p.197, where Arendt defines two functions of the polis: (1) to make excellence possible as an ordinary occurrence, and (2) to preserve the memory of excellence, to immortalize action and speech. Social issues are simply an "excuse for shining," tools which allow individuals to achieve excellence.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 6 (CONT'D): 2000.10.09 Joe Hammond
Second Half Notes: 10/9/00 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Frank Ankersmit: In order to have politics, the issues under discussion need to be issues about which people do not deeply care; politics requires a certain detachment.
Tenure decisions constitute AM's chief experience with politics. He notes that a web of trust, a commitment to a common set of procedures, and the absence of life or death commitments are all necessary components of a smooth decision-making process.
Mitterand: "I attribute my political success to massive indifference." [This sounds very plausible--people didn''t care about his familial arrangements or, more importantly, about the rather casual way that he wheeled and dealed with persons who had committed serious crimes during World War II.]
What happens to the public/private distinction in mass society? In the private domain, everyone is equal, while hierarchy and distinction characterize the public domain. With mass society, the public realm begins to function bureaucratically [in accord with the mass equality that pervades the social order], and the interests of the household invade the public realm. (p. 40-41)
Perhaps property is the last remnant of privacy in mass society. (p. 70-71)
Parallel distinctions: public/private and social/intimate.
The governing principle of the social realm is necessity. This leads to a conceptualization of activity as behavior (behavior being predictable by social scientists, allegedly). This links up to Marx, the behavioral scientist par excellence.
Intimacy and love, unlike friendship, are destroyed by being seen in public (51-52). Within the realm of the social, where there is no politics, intimacy is the last refuge, although it is a poor substitute for privacy. This intimacy is characterized by extreme subjectivity.
HA was negatively concerned with the consumer society she saw around her on her forays into middle America. She finds social, not political people, who are workers, but there is no work, only labor, within this society, since everything is being produced in order to be consumed. This is contrary to Marx's sometimes (but not always) positive spin on labor, since Marx (on occasion) sees labor as a means for the development of human potentialities (cf. the Berki article, cited above). Fichtean notion of labor includes the continuation of the development of human potentiality even after the dissolution of scarcity. HA has a Heideggerian discontent with this technologism. She argues that the drive for production and labor is so strong that it results in the production of nothing but consumptibles, and not persistent use objects. But the Lawn, and similar products of American society, may be in contradiction with this.
According to HA, freedom is emancipation from necessity and labor, but too much affluence is just as destructive to freedom. This ties into Hegel's master/slave dialectic, in which the slave's labor upon nature causes him to develop himself by overcoming material necessity, and the slave finishes on top. In addition, the master is only the master because he is recognized by the slave as such. Marx ignores this sphere of recognition--as he must, since he has no political realm in his future society.
Hegel, and Marx after him were very interested in post-Aristotelian philosophy, which was conducted after the fall of the polis. These are nonpolitical philosophies, and include Epicureanism (private pleasure), Stoicism (withdrawal to private realm, and reduction of wants), and Skepticism (we know nothing at all). Both regret this turn in Greek philosophy, but whereas Hegel wants a political order, Marx wants to transcend the political order.
AM's summary of discussion about The Human Condition: An amazing work, although frustratingly difficult to situate and clarify.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 7: 2000.10.16 Peter Villella
On Revolution is profoundly influenced by Karl Marx. Arendt thinks seriously about Marx in her attempt to define revolution, but comes to some very different conclusions about what constitutes a revolution. Of course, she is writing within a Cold War context, in a society where it's "better dead than red." Further, with the addition of "the Bomb" into questions of war and violence, Arendt needed to distinguish war from revolution - the two are not the same thing.
Arendt discusses war at some length in On Revolution, but only to justify her exclusion of its consideration within the focus of the book. Therefore a distinction is made between the two, one that is very important. We can think of the relationship as of two subcategories, war and revolution, each with separate identities, but pertaining to the same major category: violence.
Arendt makes the claim that our age is likely to be an age of revolution. She writes this in the historical context of the upheavals in Eastern Europe, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, and the process of decolonization (which were revolutions as much as they were wars once the ideas of social restructuring became connected with nationalism). It is important for us to consider what actually happened with these revolutions: did they fit Arendt's conception of revolution? Some examples that seem strong counter-examples are the Iranian revolution and the events of 1989-1990 in Eastern Europe. For example, the revolution in Iran certainly was not secularization, as in Arendt's model.
Arendt denies the connection between Christian equality and the revolutionary drive for equality. Revolution brings out an equality undreamed of in any Christian sense.
The idea of violence is important when we compare Arendt to Marx: violence is an inherent aspect of revolution for Arendt. In Marx there are obvious connections between revolution and politics, as in "all revolution is a political act," (EW 420). Of course, the communist revolution, although political by definition, will result in the transcendence/abolition of politics itself, and from then on revolution will only be social revolution, never political: "…there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society." And: "It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that 'social revolutions' will cease to be 'political revolutions.'" (MER 219)
However, for Arendt, revolution is what happens when politics fails - politics is inherently nonviolent, it consists in dialogue, words. Therefore, revolution has both political and nonpolitical aspects - it is political in the sense that ultimately it may have political motivations, but it is nonpolitical in that it is beyond politics, it is violent. Violence is central to Arendt's conception of revolution. This is contrasted with politics, which pushes violence to its periphery. This is why Athens had to force Socrates to drink the hemlock. They couldn't kill him themselves, because that would be violence, and politics is an element of persuasion, not force.
Thus, we can say that politics has a limited relationship to both war and revolution. Political considerations may be their cause, but the acts themselves are nonpolitical, or rather superpolitical, because they are violent. Further, both politics and revolution bring a new order into the world, new ideas and new policies. Therefore, there are some real connections between the two, in a relationship mainly defined by their discord.
One fundamental disagreement between Marx and Arendt is Marx's commitment to historical necessity. Arendt cannot accept the idea of a natural historical process. There can be no historical destiny, because this destroys the possibility of freedom. She wants the freedom to introduce novelties into the world, to be able to change. Therefore she attacks that aspect of Marx defined by necessity. Arendt might be more revolutionary than Marx - indeed she has to be, since while she is committed to the coming of novelties into being, true freedom, Marx remains fettered by historical necessity.
Why is Marx dedicated to necessity? Because he was a "man of science" above all (Engels's graveside speech, MER 682), a social scientist. He was dedicated to rationality. And for Marx, rationality involves universality, necessity, and predictivity. These play a role in his ideas about revolution. If there is embedded rationality in history, then there is rationality in the revolutions that inevitably come about, and therefore an element of predictivity. Thus, historical necessity.
In the New York Times, Sunday Oct. 14th, there was an article covering the succession of events following the election in "Yugoslavia." Was it more Marxian or Arendtian? It was probably more Marxian in method - all of the ingredients had been put in place long before it happened, it just needed an excuse, which was, of course, the election, which the defeated incumbent seemed on the verge of suppressing. One power was replaced by another. Arendt's revolution is a true social transformation, her main model being the French Revolution (as opposed to the American). Nothing too novel happened in Yugoslavia.
Arendt: Marx has a theory of revolution. Megill: No way, he has a doctrine, not a theory.
Is there, then, room in Marx's theory for something Arendt would call a revolution? Or conversely, can an Arendtian revolution happen in Marx? Arendt is committed to novelty, newness, sponteneity. In Marx, all of the elements of the new order are present even before the revolution that brings it about (Helmut Fleischer: Marx has three conceptions of history - history as humanization, history as praxis, and history as the working out of universal [embedded] laws). There is little room for creation in Marx. Therefore, while Arendt focuses on sponteneity, on the moment of contingency, Marx focuses on predictivity, on the moment of necessity. However, it would be wrong to deny that an element of both exists in both of their writings.
Unresolved: What do we mean by "sexual revolution?" Would Arendt call it such? On Revolution, pg. 98: what we call sexual revolution is not revolution to Arendt - it is a merely private reorganization of things. If it isn't a public matter it doesn't merit her concern. However, it remains ambiguous what her feelings would be about personal acts that are, at the same time, political (such as breast-exposing to powerful German academics). These acts are "violent," in a sense, and they are made in the same spirit as revolution - to effect change. However, for Arendt, a true revolution is made for the sake of politics, in order to ensure political freedom and the possibility of the coming of novelties into the world. But these acts are mute, they do not enter into a dialogue, indeed, they preclude the possibility of dialogue. Therefore they must not be considered truly revolutionary, even if they are "superpolitical" by nature. Further, they do not result in the founding of anything new. Therefore they are difficult to classify, even if fun to think about in class for 25 minutes.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 7 (CONT'D): 2000.10.16 Ilja Elle
In our attempts to characterize Hannah Arendt's philosophy, we emphasized the important notion of founding, i.e. the breaking with traditional and, particularly in the modern age, bureaucratic contexts, in order to create new space for political activity. We might think of Arendt as a philosopher of beginnings.
For sure, the socio-historical and epistemological status of new beginnings is by no means simple. The notion of beginning is almost paradoxical, because it simultaneously requires continuity and discontinuity with the past. There can be no beginning without some sort of continuity to the past, because beginnings only acquire their status as beginnings relative to the past, thereby stressing the continuity in the discontinuity (history and memory thereof matter), while, at the same time, they have to assert themselves against that very past, thereby stressing the discontinuity to what went before.
In the sphere of politics, the need for beginnings, the very essence of political activity, meets the additional problem of having to maintain stability, without allowing the political process to degenerate into the bureaucratic administration of things. The problem is one of "institutionalizing revolution, " which, as the term suggests, is almost impossible to do. Something is either institutionalized or revolutionary, but hardly both. The paradoxical nature of the problem suggests that a constitution or other political procedure that specifies a fixed method of due political process for all times is likely to suffocate genuine political activity. Of course, a political sphere whose boundaries and rules are somewhat "underdetermined" is susceptible to manipulation, demagoguery, et cetera. The only safeguard against this vulnerability are human beings, or better, in an Arendtian sense, human actors, who are capable of exercising both formal rationality (rationality with the context of a formally specified system) as well as substantive rationality (the capacity to deliberate about the value and ultimate meaning of a formal sets of rules). Notice that the latter perspective must always be exercised from a perspective outside the constitution or the law. The distinction between formal and substantive rationality comes from Weber, whose thought displays striking parallels to Arendt's, in this context particularly with regard to his treatment of charismatic authority.
Further parallels between Arendt and Weber. Weber believed that modernity was characterized by a process of increasing rationalization and bureaucratization of social life. The methodical execution of tasks in the modern state, bureaucracies, and capitalist firms are all governed and legitimated by so-called legal-rational authority, in the context of which people employ formal rationality (see above) to navigate the system. Genuine escape from this oppressive state of affairs, Weber's famous iron cage, can only be effected by the ideal-typical figure of charismatic hero, a prophet or Messiah like Jesus, Gandhi, or, albeit in a negative sense, possibly Hitler, who breaks with the tradition to found a new order ("It has been said, but I say onto you…"). Sadly, and this may have added to the depression Weber suffered during later years of his life, as modernity progresses, the grip of rationalization and bureaucratization on our lives strengthens, leaving less and less scope for the emergence of charismatic authority ("You say onto us, and we'll sent you to the lunatic asylum.") Last, but not least, it is important to note that Weber does not use rationalization in the sense of embedded rationality in Marx. Influenced by Nietzsche and late nineteenth century fin-de-siecle pessimism, Weber vehemently denies the notion of meaningful progress. Rationalization is a self-feeding process that, once started, is largely beyond our control.
We discussed the application of the fundamental problem of beginnings in politics in various contexts:
Arendt cites Jefferson's resistance to a constitution that couldn't be amended, precisely because she takes him to agree with her view that politics is about beginnings, and always needs, at least to a degree, to begin anew, which includes the ability to make amendments, if it is to remain genuine politics.
With regard to contemporary American "democracy," we discussed the problem that arose when the American polity came to rest, quite literally, on the efforts of the founding fathers, rather then to seek new "foundations" every once in a while. At some point, without new beginnings, the capacity for making substantively rational (political) decisions degenerates and politics turns into empty procedures. Both politicians and constituency become apathetic and cynical towards the political process.
The problem becomes further exacerbated once modern mass democracies come to define their level of well-being in economic terms, thereby reducing politics to a problem of distributing societal wealth. The problem with an almost exclusive focus on distribution of wealth is that it assumes a common measure or scale of reference for all politicians and their constituents, which again turns politics into an exercise of formal rationality. Assuming some societal welfare function, politics could be executed by a bunch of professional economists, who design policies in order to maximize wealth, which is then distributed according to the welfare function. This is yet another example of "politics" as the administration of things (this last term was originally coined by Engels.)
The goal of the political process must always be to provide space for different perspectives and debates on the foundations of the polity. Even if most of these debates do not lead to actual policies and programs, they still serve a most important function in their own right. In this context, the often-ridiculed "inefficiency" and lacking direction of democratic debates appears in a completely different light.
A further problem arises, when the outcomes of the political process are structurally determined. That this constitutes a problem in the U.S. is manifested by the close pragmatic proximity of the two (and only two) parties, which does not really allow for any serious political alternatives. The reasons for such over-determination of the political process are multiple and complex. They include external pressures, for example globalization, as well as requirements stemming from party organization and financing, all of which pose serious constraints on possible political alternatives.
We spent some time contrasting Arendt's and Marx's views on politics. Their perspectives are fundamentally at odds with each other. While Arendt celebrates the 'unintended consequences' of the political process, Marx, as a "true" scientist, is fundamentally hostile to unexplained variance and tries to incorporate it into his theoretical framework, in Weberian terms, to rationalize it. The ultimate rationalization of politics, for Marx, amounts to its transcendence (Aufhebung?), i.e. the resolution of the contradiction between public and private sphere in bourgeois society. One of the reasons behind Marx's contempt for politics was his conception of politics as involving a clash of economic interests rather than ideas (Arendt), which, indeed, reduces politics to an absurdity, which is best dealt with through an expert administration.
According to Prof. Megill, Marx's compulsive desire to theorize also led him to reject the market, because he conceived of the price mechanism as something fundamentally irrational and wasteful ("the laws of economics are lawlessness"). Since future market prices cannot the calculated by means of any scientific method, the demand and supply of goods never coincides exactly. This continuous discrepancy between demand and supply implies that social resources are not optimally allocated. Marx thought that a central planning agency could allocate resources more efficiently than the price mechanism, based on accurate measures of aggregate demand and available resources.
Marx stands in a tradition of economists who tried to find rationally discernible elements in the price mechanism. The British economist David Ricardo, for example, had developed a theory that was influential in the early nineteenth century, which stated that the price of a commodity is a function of the cost of making that commodity. He called this value a commodity's 'natural' price. The natural price theory was refuted by the French economist Leon Say, who argued that natural price could not provide a rational benchmark conception of price against which actual market prices could be compared, because the production inputs that determine the natural price of a commodity also have to be purchased at market prices, which leads back to the original problem.
Marx himself tried to solve the problem of developing a rational theory of price through his concept of labor value. According to the labor theory of value, the value of a commodity derives from the amount of labor that is expended in its production, measured in units of time at average levels of intensity and skill. The advantage of labor value was that it did not have to rely on market prices at all, thereby avoiding a circularity of argument.
We speculated whether Marx would have accepted the market combined with generous redistribution of income, in spite of its irrationality, if he had known that central planning agencies are even more wasteful than markets in allocating resources. The answer is not clear, because Marx did not only reject the market for its inefficiency, but also because it was responsible for alienating man from fellow man. The mediation of the market exchange through money turns the medium of exchange into a fetish which disguises the actual social relationships that underlie the exchange. Furthermore, market exchanges have a zero-sum character, which make us view a fellow human being as an instrument or obstacle to the realization of our ends, rather than an end in its own right.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 8: 2000.10.30 Kimberly Jones
Kimberly Jones
The Human Condition and Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth
Robert Hughes (an art critic for Time magazine) is perhaps a good example of Arendt's idea that literati are worse than their works. But let us leave aside Mr. Hughes's exciting legal adventures in Western Australia.
Arendt gives us sets of distinctions that might be valuable. Professor Megill described his trip to Los Angeles and his conference at Occidental College. He asserted that LA was like the real movies where there's space and you can see something. It's also what Marx describes capitalism as: chaotic, disorganized, and dynamic. It raises the question of whether there is a public space or must one carve out a number of private spaces for oneself.
The Norton Simon Art Museum is next to a busy thoroughfare in Pasadena. More interesting than the art itself is the enclosed garden that is an integral part of the museum. Within the garden one is aware of the traffic noise over a wall, and yet the garden creates a sense of serenity . Must one create interior spaces away from the "static" of the outside world in order to survive in modernity? This is Foucaultian territory and not Arendtian, a question of what one does to carve out a private space large enough for one's survival.
To connect the two: Antithesis between public/political space where activities are carried out and which is the object of political glory. This is the realm that has slightly more lasting products. Public space of LA is not a space for Arendtian actions, it's not political, it has no permanence, thing are changing all the time. Here, the people are flaneurs, displaying their private persona in public. One creates this persona in an inner garden by oneself or with a small group of friends. Arendt is interested in intimacy but not in displaying intimacy or writing about it. She does not think it is proper to show the private in public. While she recognizes the importance of the private, she doesn't analyze it because, she seems to be saying, it can take care of itself.
On The Oxford Companion to European Thought: The key work was to compile a list of headwords and to decide how many words to devote to each headword. (There was a dispute over whether they should include the term 'economic man' or if they should change it to 'economic individual'). There has been a boom in the production of reference works--see Times Literary Supplement (not NY Review of Books which should be NY Review of each other's books) because it is actually serious and has not no party line and draws on a wide range of authors. They have an issue every few months devoted completely to reference works and there has definitely been growth in this area. Oxford has suggested this project because (2) It'll be intellectually respectable and (1) It'll sell well.
This new encyclopedism begs the question: Why buy this sort of thing? It is blatantly obvious that no synthesis is possible. There's no way of tying together the whole world of the intellect because that world goes off in a multitude of different directions. There is an impulse towards fostering intellectual community despite the lack of commonalties. The faculty eating-place idea collapsed for this reason. The Forum for Contemporary Thought's lectures are supposed to appeal to a wide variety of people, and yet few attend. This is because people have their own intellectual gardens that do not connect to general intellectual life. There is no way to synthesize the social sciences, let alone all of European thought! Encyclopedism is the default solution because there is no general framework that really hangs together. Aachen/Atheism through Zoology. Gives people resources to get at bits of the intellectual universe, but not a synthesis. It displays the major features of more or less everything.
Arendt was a scholar who, despite her focus on humanity and her exclusion of the natural sciences etc., is trying to synthesize most aspects of human life (though also excluding the private realm). She wants to explain the public ordering of the human world which is what makes reading her difficult. Were she to turn herself into a political scientist by actually looking at historical specifics, her project would not work. It is similar to Jaspers' writings about "worldviews," embracing a large amount of material without synthesizing- also like Heidegger. Now, we just try to solve particular problems. In The Sacred Wood (around 1922) T.S. Eliot is quoted as saying that "there's no method except to be very intelligent." This is a precept of the sort that works for TS Eliot because he was very intelligent... Bertrand Russell said of Eliot-the-pupil that he said one thing over the course of the semester, but that it was so intelligent that he kept wishing Eliot would say something more. But, for most of us organization is inescapable. It keeps us from the realm of unclarity, chaos, and stupidity.
-Would Arendt consider her book an excellent act? Through great deeds we carve out a political space. Don't we need to stop and use our hands? It becomes a piece of work that is not action. Men of letters are interested in getting ahead rather than in putting forth ideas. "The point then is not that there is a lack of public admiration for poetry and philosophy in the modern world, but that such admiration does not constitute a space in which things are saved from destruction by time"( (57).
Would Achilles always be great? Only if the song is continually sung. Is there a switch on pg. 90?: "Thinking, however, which is presumably the activity of the head, though it is in some way like laboring-also a process which probably comes to an end only with life itself- is less 'productive' than labor."
-When she refers to public spaces where excellence takes place, what does she mean? Would a discourse between different branches of science count? What is the nature of the boundary between work and action? The book is a work but it is also an action. "Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its fulfillment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been"(95). This may be a similar claim to those made by Heidegger and Derrida. Heidegger thought that Socrates was the perfect example of a pure thinker because he never wrote anything down. Arendt could have thought of it and not written, but there's no proof that Arendt thought about this. Thought has to stop to remember and reify it. Labor work, and action can't be delineated, they collapse and she knows it. The book can't be an action if it doesn't exist, if it weren't made tangible. A work has to have a temporal existence.
-Would discourse in general, like that in Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge, count? Consider Arendt's notion of the agora as a marketplace rather than a public, political space. "In Greece, moreover, it was the ever frustrated ambition of all tyrants to discourage the citizens from worrying about public affairs from idling their time away in unproductive agoreuein and politeuesthai, and to transform the agora into an assemblage of shops like the bazaars of oriental despotism. What characterized these market places, and later characterized the medieval cities' trade and craft districts, was that the display of goods for sale was accompanied by a display of their production. "Conspicuous production"...is not less a trait of a society of producers than "conspicuous consumption" is a characteristic of a laborer's society"(160). This, vying for distinction and position = the agora, an economic sphere. Further, "the impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people, and the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined 'power of exchange' (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation"(209-210). Thus, in the agora, products interact and not people.
-What is the value of action if it isn't transformed into work? It's evanescent; it needs to take form in order for us to look. "The second function of the polis...was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become 'immortal,' were not very good"(197). Competitiveness contributes to the flowering of genius and a space for it. By immortalizing a deed, we institutionalize the impetus for such competition for distinction. The action aspect of the thinking that went into the Human Condition had to become the book. But if the work were not interpreted, it would not matter. Therefore, works need to have the political action that maintains the culture in existence, not memory, but tradition. (Flashback to: "without the reification which remembrance needs for its won fulfillment and which makes it...the living activities of action, speech and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they had never been"(95)). Memory is something experiential within the minds of individuals. "The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reificiaton, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself"(95-7). The polis itself is the world. Work is an action when we come together and debate/use it. Only when people use it does it really exist.
-Euripides' Trojan Women an actualization of Homer. Mike Davis' City of Quartz, about the invention of Los Angeles. Quasi-historical like the film "Chinatown," realities that exist in people's minds although they are unseeable, but it is articulated in an effective visual context- a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Is it politically energizing or just entertainment? Like Shakespeare, whom did it connect to the political/public sphere of its day? Now almost everything is commercial and we are continually entertained. Unexpectedness makes things interesting.
-What is the difference between ethics and morality for Foucault? In general, morality refers to the actual moral practices that prevail in a particular society. To be Arendtian: the French word for morals is moeurs, which means customs, manners of a given people (the sense of which is best captured by the English mores). The French word for ethics is ethique- a purely normative standard. Foucault is not interested in a genealogy of morals, a history of moral customs; he's talking about some kind of normativity.
Foucault says that ethics is the relationship to one self. If he were Kant he'd say that ethics was a categorical imperative, in its purest form, and not a hypothetical imperative. It is a universal and its categoricality is purchased at the price of considering particular instances.
God-Kant
Social World
Foucault in relation to himself
But then, maybe that isn't completely fair, because Foucault thinks of one's relationship to oneself as the basis for one's relationship to others, and it isn't so completely self-centered as it may initially appear. It's a radical quasi-aesthetic creativity. Not interested in genealogy of morals because he's kind of already been there and done that. Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals was an attempt to get at customs/moral codes. But Nietzsche is also independently attempting to form an ethics; this is something that Foucault is trying to do.
-Private and Public have become one, which has notable consequences for politicians. A coercive power exists which influences politicians' private decisions. Arendt thinks the private should remain private, and would not agree with the Clinton impeachment/scandal. Some would say that it is more disturbing that he lied under oath than that he did it.
-Can you exercise power without domination? The test could be to see it it's reversible, like with S & M. Then it's a consensual exercise of power (298) and reversible power doesn't have to be bad. Of course, it is more difficult to see how this applies beyond the personal domain (outside sexual, pedagogical situations). How could you get reversibility in the political sphere with the competition of social interests as Arendt describes it?
-Foucault walks a tightrope- not Habermasian (where we can get rid of power through ideal speech) but it can't be domination (292)- example of how the difference in age between Foucault and the interviewer is a situation where dominance is reversible. But can you really critique power while keeping it? You question the standard that tells you if it's legitimate or illegitimate. Current moral codes aren't correct but maybe they are. The problem is that there's no room for the idea of legitimate power in Foucault.
Alternative explanation: it's a game of strategy that can be guided by ethics. It's power, but not evil power, just needs to be controlled.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 8 (CONT'D): 2000.10.30 Matthew Goldfeder
Past encyclopedic eras:
18th century encyclopedia project with Diderot and d'Alembert. The latter wrote a Preliminary Discourse that laid out a logical structure for the encyclopedia that it did not ultimately follow. Instead it was alphabetical. Every synthesizing project has failed in some degree. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert aspired to be a Baconian systematic laying out of all that could be known.
German encyclopedism: Such as Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, that aspires to cover all knowledge and where the end of the circle establishes the necessity of the starting point. A more limited encyclopedism tried to lay out the structure of a particular discipline. Thus J. G. Droysen (d. 1881) repeatedly lectured on the "encyclopedia and theory of history," and published a short work on the subject (his voluminous lecture notes were published posthumously).
Kuhn's 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions was part of an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, actually volume 2, #1 in the series. It was a project of the logical positivists, but it never got beyond Kuhn. It is precisely the point of Kuhn that the sciences cannot be unified in a single framework. In some printings the page identifying it as part of the encyclopedia has been removed. Yet, is it not historically interesting? As per Megill's request, they put the page back in (at least for a while--is it in the most recent printings?).
So, what distinguishes the contemporary encyclopedic era from earlier ones? A contemporary encyclopedia needs to forgo the claim to produce the authoritative perspective on the world.
So, what is the problem with the title, Oxford Companion to European Thought? It is eurocentric. The title originally proposed was Oxford Companion to Intellectual History, but since it was to be heavily European that would not work. Not to mention that intellectual history is not a saleable title. Besides, as European Thought it serves as a model, and Oxford is already thinking of what comes next, all those encyclopedias down the list (and Oxford Encyclopedia of American Wines has just been published; one of the editors did a signing at a local bookstore last weekend). There is a whole world of potential reference books already conceptualized. This encyclopedia must have a sense of its limits and an engagement with what is outside its circle.
Within a crisis or post-crisis framework, it is impossible to establish a universal, absolute foundation. There are, however, attempts to theorize under the impossibility of foundation, such as John Rawl's Theory of Justice. It is the opposite of Arendt's The Human Condition, it is theory in a heavily analytic mode - brilliant, but problematic. Once again, always a failure.
Q: Are there two types of failures, Rawlsian and encyclopedic?
Without limits, a project would bever be finished. It would be a vegetative monster out of some horror movie, growing and growing and growing and never becoming a bouquet, never cut off, a Little Shop of Horrors.
Q: Why is Arendt a failure?
There is the analytic social-science objection that she is unclear, her concepts vague--although Rawls does not exactly offer concrete policy prescriptions either. Most academic departments would have turned down The Human Condition if it had been Arendt's dissertation, just as Foucault was turned down by Uppsala. Was there evidence for the ships of fools? No, it was a literary invention, from Sebastian Brant's poem, Stultifera navis. Arendt is just as vulnerable to historical objections. Could The Human Condition have cleared Tom Noble's desk? No.
Q: But what would political theorists say about Arendt?
Depends where and when. It is a challenge to fit the mold and still be interesting. A dissertation should be both case- and concept-specific. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee has a general interest to it. It is, however, the fate of most dissertations to be boring. Megill's dissertation was absolutely proved, extremely narrow, and extremely uninteresting.
If you want to have a publishable dissertation it is very tricky. Many disciplines do want to see a publishable dissertation, especially the job is one at a research-level institution. In some ways article-level work is a happy medium, a way to establish credentials at least at first. Weber's "Science as a Vocation" in Gerth and Mills' From Max Weber is a must for all graduate student hopefuls. Weber writes, in the lecture dating from 1919/20, that it is extremely difficult to obtain an academic position, and if you're Jewish abandon all hope. He claims the only way to get a job is through a connection with someone who thinks you are smart. That is exactly how it happened with Foucault.
In the American context academic hiring is much more bureaucratized than in other times and places (and Weber is again useful on this topic) so that the role of personal connection has been diminished (although it has certainly not disappeared). Years ago the network was Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Now the system is so multi-centered, even, and Megill hates to use the word, so diverse. No one person saying something will get you a job. It is basically bureaucratic, and getting a job requires a number of people saying something and then a hiring committee giving unanimous or near-unanimous approval, and a department not finding any reason to rebel against the committee's recommendation. Really it is an immense crapshoot. It depends on perhaps having an article or two published in good journals, on having an interesting dissertation, on not blowing the job talk, and so on. In sum, very risky.
Where are you going to find work like The Human Condition? Maybe once you have tenure you can say screw you to anyone else. Mostly, however, you will find it outside the academy, like Mike Davis' City of Quartz. The academic world has been rationalized, departmentalized, and specialized, and so Foucault and Arendt are much harder to conceive of. At the undergraduate level, on the other hand, things are a bit freer.
TA's at large universities cannot simply talk to their students. Relations are very formalized and there are multiple-choice tests. It is a function of numbers, Williams vs. UVA. The former has a comparatively tremendous emphasis on teaching, really an extreme case as a professor has to be stellar at both publishing and teaching. Mostly, at research institutions, the pressure is to get research done, and there is a sense that excess hours spent in student contact are like cutting a piece of flesh out of oneself.
Megill has been involved in slightly misbegotten attempts to improve social interaction between professors and between professors and students, and has developed an extremely jaundiced view of it. The failed garden room for faculty is a prime example. It seems like a waste of time approximately 98 percent of the time to talk randomly with professors in other specialized areas (boring lunch last week, attended out of duty). Student-faculty interaction is worse - after all 98 percent of students did not want to interact either, part of an awkwardness of both sides. This is the case unless it is intellectual interaction around some specific problem, something the student and professor have in common.
The courses Megill teaches are too big, although at UVa he has not taught very large section-divided classes or required classes, as he periodically did at Iowa. Why do students take so many classes a semester? One answer: to minimize the possibility of any one faculty member having too great an influence over a student. Another answer: the university today is training management - the principle of which is to have a command of a wide variety without any specific subject matter.
Communication amongst graduate students is much more possible than amongst faculty, who are more set in their ways. Graduate students grope around since they do not know exactly what they are going to do. Professors already know and that is why they do not go to these celebrity talks.
Foucault and Derrida could be put in same bag: as bad academics, they did not get regular positions in the French university system until late in the game. Mitterand persuaded the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales to form a philosophy department in order to hire Derrida. The Collège de France, where Foucault was, has no degree program, no students.
In the U.S. they did fit in, in an odd sort of way, because of the quarter system. U.S. schools could hire them temporarily to teach while the European schools were not in session. Derrida taught at Irvine for years. The American system is more flexible than the French, somewhere the Foucaultians are in the majority or maybe just to differentiate themselves they said let' s hire Foucault.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 9: 2000.11.06 Steven Shepard
Dates were assigned for research presentations. Megill would like to see a 4 page proposal before the presentations are made. He suggests Howard S. Becker's Writing for Social Scientists for advice on finding a topic and zeroing in.
The reading for 11/6 was "interestingly contrastive." Sartre appeared concrete, specific, and in fact mucky with detail, whereas Foucault was abstract, spare, and conceptual. This is in contrast to earlier readings by these two thinkers, where the styles were somewhat reversed.
Sartre describes the experience of slime as an "immediate shudder" getting at the essence of the experience. Here he is doing phenomenology, attempting to get at the "thing itself [die Sache selbst, in Husserl's term]." Of course the English "slime" does not capture all of the French "visqueux" ("viscosity") but is the best translation nonetheless.
Sartre really seems to be coming up with these original ideas on his own. With Foucault, by contrast, we get the sense that he is "leeching off" of one writer or another. Clearly Sartre and Nietzsche are borrowed from heavily.
The Archeology of Knowledge was written in response to the reaction to The Order of Things (1966), the first of Foucault's books to e widely noticed. The Order of Things (Words and Things, in French) had been a great bestseller in French philosophical circles, and had been characterized as "structuralist" by those who saw Foucault's epistemes as structures. (Paradigmatic examples of structuralism include Levi-Strauss 1947 Elementary Structures of Kinship, and Piaget on stages of childhood cognitive development). The Order of Things described 3 epistemes:
-the Renaissance episteme, dominated by similitude. The European mind was struck by internal relations between things, especially the relation between the sign and the signified, or so Foucault claimed.
-the classical episteme, dominated by representation. Now the sign is taken to represent the signified.
- the humanist episteme, dominated by signification, in which man is taken to be the central category. Foucault focuses on the rise of political economy, natural history, and psychology. We might also refer to this as the age of "modernism." Of course all these terms have somewhat vague and overlapping meanings.
-the post-humanist episteme: this is just beginning.
But Foucault is not a structuralist. His account of transitions between epistemes is similar to Nietzsche's account of the legislators who create a state from nothing, through their own charisma (Genealogy of Morals, essay 2). Transitions between epistemes are similarly sudden and uncaused. And Foucault claims not to attribute to the epistemes any sort of fixed, "structural" character. They are just his way of readign the material and making sense of particular texts.
Megill shares with others (Northrop Frye, Steve Pepper, Hayden White, Foucault) an attraction for the number four. Four may be seen as the anti-dialectical number. The classic triad of the dialectic (position, negation, and the negation of that negation which is itself a synthesis of a new position, restoring unity) has been called into question. Hayden White (in Metahistory, 1973) divides historiography into 4 tropes (which in turn may each be divided into 4 categories). The tropes are: metaphor (a trope of unity), metonymy (separation), synechdoche (part/whole relations may restore unity, similar to the 3rd moment of the dialectic) and irony, which both affirms and denies at once. Note the 4 faces in the Jasper Johns painting, taken as the cover picture of Prophets of Extremity.
Arendt was a dialectical thinker, but she also thought in threes and not fours. She was not a prophet of extremity, perhaps because she was too deeply touched by Fascism to be an extremist. She was suspicious, for example, of the fascist dimension of Nietzsche, of the denial of ethics and the valorization of aesthetic performance.
Both Derrida and Foucault began to turn toward ethics relatively late in their careers, in the early 1980s. Ethics has become greater focus for French philosophy in the last two decades, particularly through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Foucault approached ethics through Sartre's concepts of subjectivity. Sartre defined shame as the knowledge of others seeing you - Foucault used this to attempt an ethics.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 9 (CONT'D): 2000.11.06 Vinay Jain
Part of Nietzche's writings from the 1890s, during which he was deemed mad, may soon be published. The writings apparently contain more sense, and are more interpretable, than was previously thought [this is hearsay, however, and needs to be confirmed. AM].
A few years ago Megill ran a computer-based content analysis of Nietzche on sexuality for his paper "Historicizing Nietzche--Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case," which appears in the Journal of Modern History, 68, no. 1 (Mar 1996): 114-152. [However, it should be noted that this was not "the method" of the piece. The "content analysis" was standard for text-based disciplines and didn't involve much reliance on counting, let alone on statistical analysis. AM]
Foucault and Sartre:
Is the vagina dentata referred to anywhere in Greek mythology? Megill says probably not. [An informant tells me that she is unaware of any mythology along this line. But think of Circe, of the Sirens, and especially of the Gorgon and the famous scary head she carried, and at the same time think "displacement" (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams), and the picture changes. AM]
Foucault borrowed from Sartre's conception of "the look": Sartre said shame is the perception of seeing ourselves being seen by someone else. This feeds into Foucault's notion of panopticism, although where Sartre was generally more concerned with subjective experience, Foucault emphasized power structures. For example, Sartre wrote about the experience of the homosexual in the world, whereas Foucault concentrated on examining the social structures that placed homosexuals under scrutiny in the first place.
Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge is anti-phenomenological: it denies that it is possible to get to things themselves. And yet, while Foucault is not trying to get to things, he is not concerned with words, either. (see Archaeology, bottom of p. 47 and top of p. 48). Thus "Words and Things" is an ironic title.
On translation: The English title of Rüdiger Safranski's biography of Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: ein Meister aus Deutschland, is Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. The German title refers to Paul Celan's Holocaust poem, Todesfuge, where death is "a master from Germany." Thus Safranski evokes the Holocaust in his title, without actually naming it. The English translator opted, rightly, for a rough equivalent that would be accessible to English-readers, rather than for a literal translation.
If Foucault is too successful in his project, he runs the risk of subverting it. By arguing that epistemes are precisely not coherent structures, Foucault engages in a form-destroying, Dionysian undertaking. (As opposed to a form-giving, or Apollonian project). But by setting out to destroy forms, Foucault presupposes that there are forms. Nietzche faced the same dilemma. The force of Nietzche's parody of Christianity, as articulated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, depends on his readers' knowledge of the Christian Gospels. Nietzsche's parody cannot be understood today as it was in his time. Perhaps he was been too successful? Perhaps not: perhaps it is as much a cultural change, having nothing to do with Nietzsche's crisis thought, that has occurred, and that has made such undrstanding difficult. The actual sacred text seems to receive little attention--and it was a knowledge of that text that Nietzsche tried to play against.
When Foucault writes about structural history, he is referring to something like the approach of Fernand Braudel, who is regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest historians. Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II is a history largely focusing on what is permanent, not on what "happened." Braudel deals with the persistent structures of the Mediterranean: for example, the shepherds who, daily, lead their flocks up and down the hillsides; or, the trade routes that, once established, changed little over the centuries. Much of Braudel is more akin to human geography than to history as we traditionally know it.
But when Foucault attacks the notion of a narrative history, his target is not really "traditional" history as done by historians (against whom Braudel was reacting). Rather, his real target is the Hegelian idea of an embedded program within history. According to this notion, history is driven from the beginning by a Geist that develops over time to attain progressively higher orders. Coming out of a philosophical tradition and not a historical one, Foucault attacks the notion of founding authority that gives meaning to everything. He does so on Nietzchean grounds.
He's also attacking Descartes. The Archaeology of Knowledge is a parody of Discourse on Method. In Archaeology, all hypotheses fail. Prescriptions cannot be followed. On p. 21, in the introductory paragraphs of Chapter 1, Foucault essentially tells us his project is the anti-discourse on anti-method. He denies tradition, the search for origins, development, and evolution.
Foucault wanted to destroy the notion that anything can be taken for granted, intellectually or philosophically. The problem is that after doing so, one has nothing left to stand on. To circumvent this problem, Foucault, in his brilliance, is able to create ephemeral foundations and epistemes on which to base his works.
Foucault says the history of knowledge is the history of connaisance. When one abstracts out the rules relating subject and object in the formulation of connaisance, one is left with savoir. (see Archaeology, p. 15).
Student comment: to focus too intently on the constitution of the savoir is to risk making it into connaisance; that is, by imputing a methodology and rules on the savoir, one makes a discipline out of it, causing it to lose its distinctiveness.
Madness and Civilization (1961) is Foucault's first and most clearly anti-Hegelian book. It is an attack on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and on the Hegelian notion of embedded rationality generally; it's a philosophical work, not a historical one. In the Preface, Foucault says he wishes to get at the silent experience of the mad themselves--in other words, he wants to write the internal history of unreason, vs. the Hegelian history of reason. But in Archaeology, he says this approach was misguided, too much beholden to "phenomenology" in Husserl's sense, which tried to unearth "things themselves."
Foucault's is a dialectical objectivity: the object is constituted by the subject it views. Where one stands generates the object. According to phenomenology, in contrast, one has an experience which is supposedly fundamental in reality. The idea of getting at the very thing itself presupposes the absolute subject.
This is why Foucault associates his attempt to get at the "real nature of madness" with Husserlian phenomenology. In Archaeology, this approach is precisely the one he wants to deny. This denial is associated with the famous passage on p. 17: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write."
The archeological Foucault v. the geneological Foucault: Archaeology is a spatial, topographical text, as is the Order of Things. Foucault's passage on the Chinese dictionary, "How Animals are Divided," represents the height of his topography--Foucault wants to describe an impossible space.
Four stages of Foucault:
1) The Early Marxist (early 1950s: visible only in the first edition of Foucault's not very well known little book, Maladie mentale et personnalité).
2) The Archaeological/Quasi-Structuralist (1961-1972)
3. The Genealogical (1975-?)
4. The Ethical/Personal Subjectivist (early 1980s)
In his genealogical phase, Foucault says "I fiction the past in order to comment on the present."
The Rabinow anthology represents the Foucault of the 1980s, who turns his focus to individual human beings to determine how we can live ethically.
The History of Sexuality, vol. I, written in the third phase, focuses on the sciencia sexualis,--the savior constructed about sexuality, in the tradition of Discipline and Punish. But Volumes II and III, written in the fourth phase, are histories of the self rather than of structural domination.
Every philosopher goes back to Kant: we see space, causality, and time in the world because we have an understanding of them. But whereas Kant says there is only one set of categories to define this understanding, Foucault and Nietzche say there are a multiplicity of categories.
The very last part of class was a discussion on the Preface of The Order of Things. Foucault's invocation of Borges's Chinese encyclopedia, and his analysis of Velasquez's painting "Las Meninas," were noted. Both set-pieces highlight a weird, impossible topography, a spatiality that has no logic and could not actually exist.
--The history of madness, says Foucault, is the history of the "other," whereas the order imposed on history is the history of the "same."
--Modernity isn't finished, according to Foucault; we're still on the cusp of its end.
--Man was invented in late 18th century, says Foucault; now man is a like a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the ocean, about to be wiped out (as Foucault puts it at the end of The Order of Things).
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 10: 2000.11.13 Nawreen Sattar
Discussion of Manuscript: The Rationality of Karl Marx: Limits and Lessons of a Theory.
While reading the manuscript we should keep in mind Marx's relationship with Foucault, Sartre and Arendt. Arendt of course is especially relevant.
The question with regard to the book is whether it is interesting and defensible. The book does not and should not claim to be definitive. Some things will remain problematic and that will provide opportunities for readers/scholars to engage in a fruitful dialogue with the text. Of course at the same time, the text can't have grave errors in conceptualization.
Q. Is the commitment to embedded rationality [derived from Hegel] really present in Marx's doctoral dissertation? Not a lot of actual quotations from Marx are presented in the manuscript as support in Chapter 2.
Marx's use of Hegel overall is inferred. For example, Marx never actually acknowledges that he got the materialist conception of history by reworking Hegel's History of Philosophy. He would never admit that he is beholden to Hegel to such a high degree, and in The German Ideology is probably not even consciously aware of reworking him.
As an example of Marx (possibly) acting unconsciously: MER p.147 mid page: Marx analogizes philosophy to commerce/industry in a satirical way. Philosophers are like industrialists and merchants trying to sell their wares and constantly putting new wares on the market. He's not consciously saying that the history of philosophy is like the history of production, but somehow the analogy comes up. Marx constantly takes Hegelian assumptions for granted--as for example, when in an early journalistic article he criticizes Kantians for being "high priests of ignorance" (for holding that the noumenon is unknowable). This is a Hegelian position--cf. the Hegel quotation that is one of the epigraphs of The Rationality of Karl Marx.
Student Question: Did you say that Hegel's view of the history of philosophy is disjointed?
No, it flows well. Transitions, however, are very hard to work out in Philosophy of History. That is what was being discussed at that point. We don't know how Hegel gets from China to India to ancient Greece in the Philosophy of History. The transitions are undialectical.
The points where history is not dialectical do not influence Marx. Megill is amazed that no one picked up the Hegel-Marx connection with regard to Hegel's lectures on the History of Philosophy. But then again, the connecting work, Marx's doctoral dissertation, is so incomprehensible that Megill was able to decipher it only through a three pronged effort, that of a research assistant, Breckman and himself.
The matter is further complicated because even Marx's doctoral dissertation does not exist as a single coherent text. We have notebooks and an incomplete manuscript that is really a rethinking of the actual dissertation after it had been submitted. That manuscript contains footnotes with radical ideas that Marx could not have included in his actual dissertation if it were to have any chance of acceptance.
But using what we have we can make sense of Marx's argument. The doctoral dissertation is the connecting piece between Hegel's History of Philosophy and the German Ideology.
Q. What does Hegel mean when he says, "Now the History of Philosophy is complete."
It is possible that he could be just referring to the course he had just finished teaching. The meaning of "History" is up for contention. Even the History of Philosophy is not based on any authoritative manuscript of Hegel because he died before compiling one himself. What we have is a collection of lecture notes that had been organized in a coherent compilation by Marx's law professor at Berlin.
The first two volumes of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy came out in 1833 and the third one was published in 1835. There are 18 volumes in Hegel's Werke as a whole, and the History of Philosophy volumes had all sold out by 1840. Then a new edition of the LHP came out that was different from the original, being another way of putting together Hegel's lecture notes, published in three volumes in 1840, 1842, and 1844. It contains different material that illustrates similar points. Clearly the authoritativeness of the LHP is in question. given that Hegel had no say in how it was put together. However, Megill believes that Hegel did mean that the History of Philosophy had been completed with his philosophical system.
Q. If philosophy is finished what does Hegel suggest we do now?
Fill in the details, for example write the rational history of law. Or as a more radical response, not exactly entertained by Hegel, we can engage in something new, e.g. praxis: what Marx picked up on.
Notice how Hegel's arrogance lays the groundwork for a completely different project that nevertheless stems from Hegel. Others had also picked up the idea of praxis: e.g. the Polish philosopher Cieszkowski, who in 1838 published a book, Prolegomena to Historiosophy, based on Hegel's phenomenology that argued the need for praxis. Cieszkowski makes the teleological claim that world history drives us to praxis. But he had no real influence on Marx. Then there's also Moses Hess, a Jewish journalist from the Rhineland, like Marx, who did influence Marx..
Marx's concern with praxis is an extension of Hegel. According to Hegel, the circle of philosophy has been completed. Now we can either fill in parts of the circle or (the radical response, not sanctioned by Hegel) create a new one altogether. This issue can also be seen in Kuhnian terms. We can solve the problems of the original model or create a new one that supersedes the old paradigm. But by creating a new model, Marx forgets his fundamental dependence on the older one .i.e. his dependence on Hegel.
Q. Doesn't this mean Hegel was right to make such an arrogant claim? After all, if people move on to praxis, then philosophy is finished.
In a sense everyone is responding to Hegel. On the continental side modern philosophy often did take Hegel as the key figure (Kant is the other option). Continental philosophers have for the most part been concerned with the conception of totality that comes from Hegel.
For Foucault the whole idea is to break the totality. It is the same for Nietzsche, Derrida, and Deleuze. When the obsession is with breaking, with contradiction, you need someone to hold the totality, and that someone is Hegel.
Marx, however, is the first one to rebel in this way, long before the others mentioned above. But unlike the crisis thinkers e.g. Nietzsche, Marx is still deeply attached to Hegelian premises. He is still committed to Embedded Rationality.
Marx got Capital wrong because he was committed to an essentializing method, which he got from Hegel. His commitment to necessity, predictivity etc. also stems from Hegel. At the same time, the empiricism is his own.
Megill is struck by the mix of idealism and empiricism in Marx. The evidence for Marx's empiricism is especially present in Capital. Marx is influenced by Hegel and Aristotle (who presents a metaphysical conception of understanding the world and social science). He can be seen as the last of Aristotelian deductivists and the first of the social scientists. An irony: Marx couldn't have written Capital without Hegel, and yet Hegelian assumptions lead the analyses in some wrong directions.
Q. How was Marx influenced by Hegel in terms of his conception of freedom given that Hegel talks of the individual attaining freedom by growing into his place in the community: a positive freedom? There is no conception of negative freedom in Hegel. So where does Marx get his almost Lockean negative freedom?
It is true that for Hegel the individual has to be part of a community. Hegel quotes a Greek asking, "How will my son be good?" The answer is "by being part of a state with good laws."
"Freedom from" (negative freedom) has often been seen as an Anglo-American conception. Marx has something of this notion in his work, but the anti-authoritarian side of his thought stems not from Lockean notions, but from Marx's being "the guy he is" (admittedly, Marx is also an authoritarian). Marx's father called him a rude, impolite, immoderate, negating genius in a letter of December 1838. His father was right.
Leonard Krieger claims that the German idea of freedom is freedom IN the state, whereas the Western (Anglo-American) idea of freedom is freedom FROM the state. This is an overdrawn contrast, but one with much truth in it. Ultimately there is no exclusively German path. As for Marx, he wants both the individual and the community to be free [see On the Jewish Question]. Then he transports that freedom to the economic realm.
At the end of The German Ideology Marx and Engels say that if proletarians are to assert themselves as individuals, they have to overthrow the state. Here he is stressing the individual. But there are passages where he says that it has to be both the individual and the community: see end of the first section of On the Jewish Question and Socialism Utopian and Scientific). However, contrary to what A. Walickki claims, Marx does not subordinate the individual to the collectivity. In his own life, Marx was a striking individual as made clear by this father's letter. In an 1842 debate on the freedom of the press Marx says, "The mortal danger for every being is losing himself." In principle, he is as committed to individuality as he is to the collectivity.
Q. Is it freedom of the individual by the individual or is it individual freedom through the state?
Remember that the political state is abolished. Marx never articulates a commitment to equality either. The only notion of equality we can construe in Marx is equality that results from freedom for all. See German Ideology.
Q. Was Marx ever in a position to run something?
He was the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, the newspaper that was so good that it was banned. He didn't run it for long: he became the editor in October 1842 and it was banned in March 1843. Marx was mostly a freelance scholar subsidized by Engels. At the same time he was also a political figure trying to arouse a working class movement in Germany.
|NOTES FOR HIEU 507, SESSION 10 (CONT'D): 2000.11.13 Peter Locke
Many present-day readings of Marx mistakenly attribute to him a commitment to equality - but according to Professor Megill, that's an improvement of Marx, rather than an accurate reading. Marx is not committed to democracy or equality.
Question: Is Engels more committed to democracy? Does the tradition of misreading Marx as an advocate of democracy and equality begin with Engels?
-- No. In fact, the Engelsian Marx is yet more hostile to democracy.
Engels gives us "dialectical materialism," which holds that the material structure must come before all other concerns. This was not Marx's view. Lenin and Stalin took up dialectical materialism - this makes sense, considering Stalin's impulse to build up a socialist productive system as quickly as possible in the Soviet Union.
Marx has a "productivist" vision of history, emphasizing human activity. In his later, "dialectical materialist" speculations, Engels de-emphasizes the human element and makes matter, material forces, primary in a way that Marx doesn't. It isn't difficult to see how Engels' position could contribute to the development of an anti-democratic, anti-humanist Marxism.
We can find a humanist, democratic Marx in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts"--insofar as there is a democratic Marx to be found at all. Prof. Megill guesses that the literature on Marx and democracy draws on Marx's early writings and is goes back primarily to the 1950s and 60s, when scholars were reacting against Soviet Communism. (However, this is a speculation, and is not based on a thorough survey of the literature. AM) Before the 1950s, there probably wasn't much literature on Marx and democracy - the big problem was how to go about building socialism. Some argue that the later Marx believed that socialism could be achieved through voting, which is true (the matter is discussed in Avineri's book on Marx, for example), but they forget that the political state would then disappear, and if there is no political state, how can there be democracy?
What about contemporary Marxist political theorists?
There's been quite a lot of political theory written that draws on Nietzsche and Foucault - so, perhaps there will be a rebirth of Marxist theorizing. Luxemburg and Gramsci might be characterized as "democratic Marxists," at least potentially: Luxembourg's notion of spontaneous ideas and Gramsci's counter-hegemony point to a struggle for control of words and ideas, rather than for material forces.
The Marx and democracy literature might pick up steam from the contradiction in Marx between the concern for freedom and the commitment to science and predictivity. It's not that science precludes freedom - according to Marx, if we understand the laws of nature and society, we can control them, rather than being controlled by them.
One problem with this view is that there are many things that can't be predicted very well - there are too many contingent factors to account for (as is well known, small causes can have big, and sharply unpredictable, effects--a butterfly flapping its wings once in Brazil, can "cause" a tornado in Iowa six months later).
But let's leave that problem aside, and stick with Marx's vision. In Marx's view, community decisions will follow seamlessly from a scientific understanding of the world - see the example of the bridge, page 1 of Megill 's chapter 3. But what about building a road--not the technology of road-building, but where to build it? Let's assume that it would benefit those living closest to it. Here things get more complicated - we think that the location of the road has to be decided democratically/politically, because there's no "scientific algorithm" to determine it. This inadequacy of science, the fact that at many points science can't tell us what to do, opens up what we might call a "political gap."
Marx would say that every political conflict will eventually be subsumed under some scientific algorithm. Beyond this faith in science, how does Marx bridge the political gap?
(1) He has a strong faith in production - we 'll be able to build enough roads to please everyone. Socialism is "post-scarcity:" we won't need to fight over material goods, because they'll be readily available to all. Everyone gets a piano. (2) Marx believes in a common species-being, that we're fundamentally good, that conflict isn't inherent in humanity.
We can infer from the dialectic, from the continuing synthesis of contradictions, that we'll eventually reach a point where there are no more troubling contradictions - a final homogenization. Unbridgeable differences will vanish, making politics unnecessary. But in this light, there are some aspects of the world today that Marx simply wouldn't know what to do with - for example, the continuing power of religion (e.g., Islamic republics; and why is the U.S. so religious when it's so materially advanced?)
Arendt vs. Marx: For Arendt, politics is about excellence and novelty, which can't be administrated. For Marx, the material base of society is primary, so he might say that all this excellence stuff Arendt talks about is epiphenomenal.
Marx's vision of unitarism and homogenization would not be able to deal with today's pluralization of identities along national, religious, and "ethnic" lines - "re-tribalization" despite economic homogenization. Identities and religions often become key political issues.
Andrew points out that there's something in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics that Marx misses in a fundamental way. The inquiries of Hegel, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, Lessing, etc., into aesthetics mark the beginning of an awareness of the "aestheticization" of politics in the 19th century; this aestheticization increases the danger of totalitarianism and makes real communication impossible. We can't communicate because each individual lives in his/her own aesthetically constituted reality, which might be dissimilar from the "real" world or from those created by other members of the community. (We're reminded of Arendt's argument that politics is only possible when individuals share a "common object" or "common substrate.")
Professor Megill agrees that Marx misses this line of thought (although he did try to write poetry and drama in the 1830s). Jakob Burkhardt, a friend of Nietzsche's and author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, figured it out; perhaps living in Basel, a "backwater," made him sensitive to particularity and aesthetics. See also Josef Chytry's The Aesthetic State.
Marx was very much aware of the anthropological concerns of the late 19th century, but by this time, he was firm in his theory. It's difficult to justify the notion of a simple and single force guiding history from the point of view of anthropology. Marx did write "ethnological notebooks," which were published in 1972. Marx is sometimes willing to diverge from and contradict his theory, but he never comes up with a different one. He changes his views on certain matters, but not his theory. For Marx, difference is epiphenomenal, despite his occasional attentiveness to the problems of particular situations.