Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "Slapstick"

What would I have thought of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 1976 novel Slapstick had I read it when it came out? I had read his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, but some time in the interval I had moved on to other interests until 2006, when I was given Timequake. Vonnegut died in 2007, and I know around this time I had read some of his later nonfiction and began to re-read a couple of novels. I rediscovered Vonnegut as I had rediscovered other people I had drifted away from in the mid-’70s. I don’t recall even being aware of the publication of further novels in the ‘70s, and I think I might have thought that Vonnegut was done with them in 1973. But I must have thought I absorbed everything I had to gain from him. So what would I have thought of Slapstick, his next novel after 1973? And what do I think of it now that I have finally read it?

My reaction was one of both familiarity and bewilderment. One familiar element was Vonnegut’s constant repetition of catch-phrases, this time “Hi ho.” This adds caustic irony to the narrative as did Vonnegut’s catch-phrases in his earlier novels, although for me his catch-phrase wore thin after a while this time around. Also characteristic is the deceptive simplicity, easily readability, and often cartoonish character of Vonnegut’s style, which looks easy but just try and write that way yourself. There is the prominence of Indiana, Vonnegut’s homeland, though the story is initially set in New York City (now known as the Island of Death). And then there is Vonnegut’s outrageous imagination. But this time I couldn’t place it in making sense out of it, especially in relating it to the state of American society of the mid-’70s. Even the title, indicating Vonnegut’s dedication of the work to Laurel and Hardy, struck me as puzzling. Woody Allen’s dystopian film comedy Sleeper made sense to me and was much funnier, and the slapstick in that film was real slapstick.

Vonnegut begins his Prologue by stating that it is the closest thing to an autobiography he is ever going to write. The bizarre symbiotic relationship between the novel’s narrator and his sister is in some way an imaginative projection of Vonnegut’s feelings about his own sister and himself. He also states that the novel represents what life feels like to him, and that he loves the personifications of Laurel and Hardy because they did the best they could with their destinies.

Note that the novel’s subtitle is “Or, Lonesome No More!”—which, as we learn much later, is the narrator’s campaign slogan on which he wins the presidency of the United States. Vonnegut recycles an earlier idea of his of arbitrarily creating extended families to create a novel form of support system. The condition this is meant to address was a concern of American sociologists, notably Philip Slater’s 1970 The Pursuit of Loneliness. I remember, accurately I hope, that Slater had written that the revolutionary political slogan for the American (white) middle class should be ‘no more loneliness’.

What then, was contemporary about Slapstick? I could discern only the mention of Richard Nixon and the curious use of mainland China as the inscrutable world power sciencefiction-ly pulling the strings as the USA declines—which could easily be applicable to the present though a haphazard ‘prediction’ in the mid-’70s, after which Nixon had visited China and around the time of Mao’s death.

By Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s social criticism had progressed to the trashing of American society, or, somewhat more specifically, of ‘Middle America’. What comes next?—is a question I have only now posed. It seems to me that Slapstick represents not the objective state of the USA as a whole in the mid-’70s but rather the disintegration of Vonnegut’s own midwestern universe.

There are familiar elements of post-apocalyptic utopias here—plagues that wipe out millions, social breakdown . . . and even rendering this in a comedic farcical mode is not jarring (remember Sleeper), but the specific mode in which the social transformation occurs strikes me as rather conceptually anemic. The narrator, known eventually as Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, becomes president on the basis of his ‘loneliness no more!’ slogan, in which extended families are arbitrarily established and networked on the basis of his middle-naming system. As the existing governmental organization of the United States disintegrates, the new extended family system results in fiefdoms of warring clans. (And the Hatfield-McCoy feud is not forgotten.) Well, this latter development has a certain logic to it, but, while the totality of the developments described may well be characterized as slapstick—and now we are surely living in a political state of outrageousness oblivious to consequences, they are in my view not effective in characterizing the forces of social breakdown. Social isolation and individual helplessness are indeed the breeding ground of fascism—which isn’t exactly the social order depicted here either—but this cute Vonnegut notion of the artificial extended family cannot carry the weight ascribed to it. It really represents the limit of the midwestern sensibility of his generation that Vonnegut injected into his ouevre. The Vonnegut imagination persists, and I suppose in some way it reflects the social decline perceptible in the 1970s, but only dimly through Vonnegut’s personal lens.

I have not read the intervening novels, but Hocus Pocus in 1990 is on point with respect to American dystopia. By 1973 Vonnegut’s social critique had traveled a long way from 1952’s Player Piano, and apparently sometime in the 1980s he was prepared to confront America’s irreversible social decline imaginatively with greater exactitude.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (9)

My running commentary on Dostoevsky reflects what I have assimilated at the moment of writing and my perspective changes with what I learn. My latest podcast was a rush job in which I sought to synthesize a lot of my diverse reading into an overall picture of intellectual and ideological history, in which Dostoevsky plays a part as one of those pivotal figures of the 19th century.

The 14th installment of my radio series “Studies in a Dying Culture,” recorded on 18 November 2017, has both a recording and a written-out text which approximates but is not identical to the actual podcast and has supplementary links and comments. The written text is here:

Dialectic and Dystopia: A Century Before and After the Russian Revolution Through Literature (podcast transcript) by R. Dumain

Listen or download here. [39:40 min.]

DESCRIPTION: November 7 marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I commemorate this crucial historical event in an oblique manner by examining the works of key creative writers and other thinkers from the 19th century up through the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution who confronted modernity’s essential philosophical and existential issues. Writers discussed include Mary Shelley, Charles Fourier, Friedrich Engels, George Eliot, Herman Melville, Imre Madách, Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, György Lukács, Leon Trotsky, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, with mentions of others and with Theodor Adorno and Richard Wright as a coda. All of this is to illustrate the historical failure to render irrational society rational and, with respect to world views, the unresolved dialectic of reason and unreason in the modern world.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (7)

My understanding of Notes from Underground and its context has developed since I finished reading it. There are a number of factors to consider, among them: (1) Dostoevsky's opposition to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and the radical, Westernizing Russian intelligentsia, (2) criticism of the "bookishness" and formulaic expressions of the intelligentsia in relation to real life, (3) the Underground Man's indictment of his social milieu and himself, (4) the Underground Man as unreliable narrator, (5) the divergence between the Underground Man and Dostoevsky, (6) the philosophy of the Underground Man (and of Dostoevsky) in part 1, (7) the relationship of the actions in part 2 to the philosophical position of part 1.

I had equated the Underground Man with Dostoevsky himself, whereas the relationship between the two, as well as the relationship between the stated philosophy and lived reality is more complex in the work. The Underground Man's rebellion against rationalism is a failure, though some self-awareness is achieved where his narrative is broken off, and the entire Russian intelligentsia stands accused along with his self-accusation. Dostoevsky himself has an agenda for attacking rationalism and the intelligentsia. Where does it lead? His alienation leads to authoritarianism, reaction, and Christian apologetics, his torment to the justification of torment.

The reception of Dostoevsky's work, not only in Russia and the Soviet Union but abroad in very different contexts, is also eye-opening.

From this rush of research I compiled the following bibliography, with web links where feasible:

Dostoevsky’s Underground, Ideology, Reception: A Very Select Bibliography

I note briefly the relevance of these references to my projects. Joseph Frank is especially useful for mapping the conceptual structure of the novel. Let me call attention to two other references, which branch out into the big picture:

Carroll, John. Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. 2^nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. (Orig. pub. 1974.)

I loathe anarchists, and I prefer Paul Thomas's Karl Marx and the Anarchists, but this book embarks upon a detailed analysis of Dostoevsky's irrationalism, his relationship to Stirner and Nietzsche, and the opposition to the rationalist "crystal palace" utopia celebrated in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.

Jacoby, Russell. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. See esp. Introduction.

Jacoby says nothing about Dostoevsky here, but his book is relevant to the issues, as Jacoby highlights the 'defeated' perspectives of dissident Marxists and reactionary thinkers who analyzed modernity’s underbelly obscured by the scientistic orientation of orthodox Marxism. The Introduction lays out his perspective.

All of this is to fit into the historical puzzle of the interlocking struggle and inseparability of the contradictions of the modern world, the capitalist world (which includes Stalinism), abstractly designated by positivism vs. irrationalism, or scientism vs Romanticism.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (6)

I shall have a lot more to say, plus add additional references. First, let me link to pages on my web site that engage Dostoevsky:

Georg Lukács on Dostoevsky & the future of the novel

Stavrogin’s Confession by Georg Lukács

C. P. Snow on the ‘Two Cultures’: Literary Modernism, Irrationalism & Reactionary Politics

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Notes for Discussion by R. Dumain

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Annotated Bibliography by R. Dumain

Gary Saul Morson: Genre, Utopia, Sideshadowing, Tempics, Prosaics, Parody, Misanthropology, Philosophy, Literary Theory, Borges: Select Bibliography by R. Dumain

The Richard Wright connection is key to my future exploration of this topic.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (5)

I have finished Part 2 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), and so I have read the entire novel.

I completely disagree with the Underground Man's world view (which might be Dostoevsky's) presented in Part 1, but this work is characteristic of the 19th century obsession with the obstinacy of human irrationality in a modernizing world with a growing scientific, rationalistic world view. This is what "underground" consciousness was. It would not shock anyone now, but it ruptured the veneer of existing civilization at the time. As I suggested in other terms in my first post, there are several aspects to the thesis laid out that are jammed together, both the metaphysical and the historical/epochal (conjunctural).

In Part 1 the Underground Man is up against a stone wall.

What stone wall? Why of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact.

And this goes on. But ....

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

From a schema of unbridgeable dualism the Underground Man deduces the cussedness of human nature, though we cannot be sure if his orientation towards it is positive or negative. It seems that a mechanistic, logical, or dare I say positivistic interpretation of reality bars any role for self-propelled human volition.

Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation.

Man could not tolerate the tedium of a rationally ordered utopia. (Shades of Madách and Szathmári!)

There is more than one way to interpret this rebellion against '2 x 2 = 4', but given the Underground Man's hostility to putatively facile conceptions of rational progress, he lays down the reactionary basis of Dostoevsky's philosophy.

Part 2 is in its own way noteworthy, perhaps scandalous for the 19th century, and something new perhaps for Russia, which had only just freed its serfs. The Underground Man is passive-aggressive, deeply resentful of others, both challenging them and seeking acceptance of them, constantly humiliating himself with his impotent gestures, loathing himself as much as others, alternately hostile and ingratiating. He does this with a circle of acquaintances he imposes himself on (old school chums and their leading light Zverkov, all of whom he loathes), then with the prostitute Liza, then with his servant, then with Liza again, then he recognizes what a spiteful worm he is, finally the narrative breaks off unresolved with a comment from the fictional editor.

When he first wakes up with Liza in a brothel, he gives her a speech, projecting all sorts of feelings onto her, then acting like her savior. She tells him he sounds bookish, but she is finally convinced by the horrible future he lays out for her and is shaken into taking him seriously and accepting his invitation to his home, for which he hates her and pours scorn upon her when she shows up.

When he comes to the moment of self-realization at the end, he admits he is totally out of touch with real life, but because he is acutely self-conscious of this, he might be more in tune with reality since everyone else is just as "bookish" in the sense of being removed from real life. His final words, before the "editor" steps in and breaks off the narrative and concludes with a final note, are:

Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us—excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."

In order for me to render this proposition more believable, I have to translate it into my own social reality. If the Underground Man were merely socially awkward and out of step with a soulless society, I could make sense of his claim. Even the spitefulness and self-humiliation, if it were not carried to an extreme, might make sense. But this orgy of self-humiliation strikes me as too close to the mentality of the misanthropic Christian sinner for me to swallow. Furthermore, it seems itself to be entirely swallowed up by the decaying feudal society that it represents, but without actual historical consciousness.

(All of this, by the way, seems to confirm Trotsky's assessment, summarized in previous posts.)

Which brings me to the question: what does part 2 have to do with the philosophical disquisition of part 1? The argument in part 1 is laid out in absolute abstract terms, yielding a world without history or development. The stubbornness of human irrationality is deeply ingrained, it will prove to destroy us and all life on Earth, but it doesn't live on air. The world view presented is familiar (reminiscent of Kierkegaard, for example); it is the very metaphysical stuff of political reaction.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (4)

This installment is part 3 of Trotsky vs Dostoevsky, a unit of the larger project of analyzing the ideological structure of Dostoevsky's work. These references do not specifically address Notes from Underground, but the issues are the same.

I linked to the following essay without comment in a previous post:

A Special Supplement: The Other Dostoevsky by Philip Rahv, The New York Review of Books, April 20, 1972

Here is Rahv on Trotsky:

What exactly have we given in the area of philosophy or social science?” His answer: “Nothing, a round zero. Vladimir Solovyov, who is usually remembered only on the anniversary of his death? His foggy metaphysics has not entered the history of world-thought; even in Russia his ideas failed to produce anything like a philosophical movement.” Trotsky continues by holding up to scorn the philosophical small fry who are looking forward to the imminent appearance of “a Slavic Kant.” “Where is he? He does not exist. Where is our Hegel? Where is one of equal importance in the history of thought? In philosophy we have none but third-rate disciples and faceless epigoni.

The quotes from Trotsky come from this essay:

“Concerning the Intelligentsia,” by Leon Trotsky, translated from the Russian by Philip Rahv and Irwin Weil, footnotes by Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, Fall 1968, pp. 585-598. Written 1912, published in Kievskaya Mysl. The following quote, p. 592:

In the novel A Raw Youth Dostoyevsky’s Versilov looks at Europe, as Herzen dld, with an anguish not unmixed with contempt. “There,” he says, “the conservative is only struggling to protect his living, and the store-clerk pours out his kerosene only to earn his daily morsel of bread. Russia alone lives not for itself but for the sake of an idea. . . .It is now nearly a century since Russia [that is, Russia’s intelligentsia] has been living without any thought for itself but for Europe alone.” The same Versilov says, “Europe created the noble images of the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the German; but it still knows almost nothing of the nature of the future man. It would seem, however, that Europe still does not care to know. This is understandable, as they are not free, whereas we are free. In all of Europe, I, with my Russian anguish, was the only free man. . . .” Versilov cannot see that, unlike the European conservative or the clerk in the kerosene-store, he had freed himself not only from the fetters of his class traditions but also from the possibility of social creativity. The same faceless environment which had given him his subjective freedom also loomed before him as an objective barrier.

Trotsky had a keen sense for the ideological underpinnings of philosophy and literature as well as a capable sensibility far beyond the limitations of other leading Bolsheviks. Here Trotsky excoriates the vain self-aggrandizement of the Russian intelligentsia that finds itself uprooted from the past but has nothing to go on but its inflated sense of destiny. Trotsky finds the history of Russia a culturally impoverished one, not even being able to boast the glories of other feudal regimes. Whether Slavophiles, populists, or even partisans of modern ideas, the intelligentsia was compelled to fasten onto one or another grand ideology and to absorb hastily and superficially the products of centuries of cultural evolution that had transpired in the West, as an alternative to their own backward station and severance from their roots. Hence their illusions of being free spirits and sacrificing themselves for the people, encapsulated in the quote from Dostoevsky. Four paragraphs on, Trotsky travesties some lines from a poem just quoted: "Versilov's version of  'freedom' could have no other meaning than this freedom of our thought to wander without any work to do."

Then Trotsky ridicules Russian intellectual accomplishments and we come to the passage quoted by Rahv (first paragraph above.) Trotsky is less than impressed even by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Lavrov, and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky. Bakunin gets grudging acknowledgment. Even Tolstoy yields political sterility. Belinski is found to be weak. Six more paragraphs and Trotsky has washed his hands of the Russian intelligentsia.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (3)

Actually, this is Trotsky vs Dostoevsky, part 2, but it's all part of the larger trajectory. So this time, here are the other references to Trotsky I have found in his works, with relevant quotes, as well as an important article by Philip Rahv of Partisan Review and New York Intellectuals fame.

Trotsky’s 1908 tribute to Leo Tolstoy by Leon Trotsky (originally in Die Neue Zeit on September 18, 1908)

Tolstoy’s style is identical with all of his genius: calm, unhurried, frugal, without being miserly or ascetic; it is muscular, on occasion awkward, and rough. It is so simple and always incomparable in its results. (He is just as far removed from Turgenev, who is lyrical, flirtatious, scintillating and aware of the beauty of his language, as he is from Dostoyevsky’s tongue, so sharp, so choked-up and pock-marked.)

In one of his novels Dostoyevsky―the city dweller without rank or title, and the genius with an incurably pincered soul―this voluptuous poet of cruelty and commiseration, counterposes himself profoundly and pointedly, as the artist of the new and “accidental Russian families,” to Count Tolstoy, the singer of the perfected forms of the landlord past.

“If I were a Russian novelist and a talented one,” says Dostoyevsky, speaking through the lips of one of his characters, “I would unfailingly take my heroes from the well-born Russian nobility, because it is only in this type of cultured Russian people that it is possible to catch a glimpse of beautiful order and beautiful impressions ... Saying this, I am not at all joking, although I am not at all a noble myself, which besides, you yourself know ... Believe me, it is here that we have everything truly beautiful among us up till now. At any rate, here is everything among us that is in the least perfected. I do not say it because I unreservedly agree with either the correctness or the truth of this beauty; but here, for example, we have already perfected forms of honor and duty which, apart from the nobility, are not to be found not only perfected anywhere in Russia, but even started ... The position of our novelist,” continues Dostoyevsky without naming Tolstoy but unquestionably having him in mind, “in such a case would be quite definitive. He would not be able to write in any other way except historically, for the beautiful type no longer exists in our own day, and if there are remnants that do exist, then according to the prevailing consensus of opinion, they have not retained any of their beauty.”

Literature and Revolution (1924) by Leon Trotsky:
Chapter 2: The Literary “Fellow-Travellers” of the Revolution"

There is falseness even in Dostoievsky’s pious and submissive figures, for one feels that they are strangers to the author. Be created them in large degree as an antithesis to himself, because Dostoievsky was passionate and bad-tempered in everything, even in his perfidious Christianity.

Literature and Revolution (1924) by Leon Trotsky:
Chapter 7: Communist Policy Toward Art

It is childish to think that bourgeois belles lettres can make a breach in class solidarity. What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoyevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc.

A Special Supplement: The Other Dostoevsky by Philip Rahv, The New York Review of Books, April 20, 1972

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (2)

In an old post on Trotsky on religion, a quote from Trotsky mentions Dostoevsky. Here I will extract a short quote from the longer quote:

Religion is a sop and a leash. Religion is a poison precisely during a revolutionary epoch and in a period of the extreme hardships which are succeeding the conquest of power. This was understood by such a counter-revolutionary in political sympathies, but such a deep psychologist, as Dostoevsky. He said: ‘Atheism is inconceivable without socialism and socialism without atheism. Religion denies not only atheism but socialism also.’ He had understood that the heavenly paradise and the earthly paradise negate one another.

-- Leon Trotsky, The Position of the Republic and the Tasks of Young Workers, Report to the 5th All-Russian Congress of the Russian Communist League of Youth (1922). Published in the Bulletin of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Russian Communist League of Youth (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1923). Translated by R. Chappel, published 1972.

The sentence about negation reminds me of Bakunin. The contrapoised perspectives of Dostoevsky and Trotsky in this passage are abstract schemata. The Russian context and the particular struggle of the revolution against the clerical despotism of a peasant society give flesh to these schemata. Trotsky doesn't mention specific works, but he acknowledges Dostoevsky as a ‘deep psychologist’, all the more reason to push back against religion.

I am not going to comment further on the argument, except to note that my other posts on Trotsky highlight more of his perspective, which harkens back to Marx and reveals a more subtle conception of how to deal with religion than what was eventually practiced in the USSR, especially under Stalin. Trotsky recognized that irrational ideas germinate and prosper in an irrational society, and hence the social basis of irrationality must be undermined, not just the ideas. But here is the catch: the balance of forces (and I don't mean only opposing political forces) undermine the process of instituting reason in the world. And the pretension to reason itself becomes undermined by a dark irrational undercurrent.

Dostoevsky’s schema, as presented in the first part of Notes from Underground, is as abstract as any rationalism. Yet the underground consciousness must be reckoned with, for even reason, which is already disrespected everywhere, can be irrational. This was the rationale behind Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was also conceptualized too abstractly, alas.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (1)

I have finished Part I of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and have begun Part II, for the second time. I was supposed to have it read for a book club, but I have missed a meeting for the umpteenth time. I read it once before some years ago, but it didn't register then. At the time I was interested because of its alleged influence on Richard Wright. I found Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground" much more interesting. But this time I'm getting what Dostoevsky wrote.

I'm not buying the world view that I think this is expressing, but there are multiple implications of what is presented. It immediately reminds me of a cultural/ideological crisis perceptible in the mid-19th century, fueled by the social changes I need not summarize coupled with--crucially--the rising dominance of the scientific, naturalistic world view and the displacement of the supernatural conception of man’s place in the cosmos. Dostoevsky radically disrupts the prospective of social progress and the triumph of a rational social order (utopian) via the (underground) recognition of man's irrational drives and stubborn will that at every juncture violates submission to natural law (let alone order) and even mathematical truth (2 + 2 = 4).

This can be taken two ways; both are probably intended at once. One can of course see this as the mushrooming of reactionary irrationalism that one finds in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and on the other hand, as positivism's antagonist, complement, blood brother, and black sheep of the family. Wikipedia, which never lies, tells me that this work is a riposte to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (1863). But this recognition of unconscious drives, of existentialist displacement, of the diremption of the conscious individual and the social collective remains an ineliminable problem regardless of the ideology of its proponents. Pre-Marxist Lukács, having passed through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, at one point saw Dostoevsky as the most advanced proponent of this sensibility and orientation to society, and would not relinquish him as he relinquished the other two.

I am leaving out the other major feature of the work, which is the public self-humiliation of the Underground Man and his total ineffectuality in society, which makes this work unique. But first, I note the philosophical configuration of the work, which remarkably, looks to my semi-educated mind as a phenomenon that erupted in several European nations and in the USA about the same time, as the implications of modernity, crisis, and naturalism were coming into focus, with Imre Madách (The Tragedy of Man, 1861), Jules Verne (his early unpublished 1863 novel Paris in the Twentieth Century), George Eliot, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, 1851). As for the crisis of world view, Engels saw what was coming in his 1844 critique of Carlyle.

Sándor Szathmári on the monomania of prophets

Sándor Szathmári wrote a novel in Hungarian and Esperanto--Voyage to Kazohinia, now available in English from an American publisher--that belongs in the dystopian pantheon with Karel Čapek's R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984.

Kazohinia is unique in that it presents two diametrically opposite societies, one composed of the Hins, robotically orderly, rational, and mechanistic, and the Behins, totally irrational and chaotic. Gulliver (recycled from Jonathan Swift) finds himself in both neighboring but mutually isolated societies, unable to tolerate either one, and unable to see that the insane, violent Behins are merely an exaggeration of the British and European civilization he uncritically adores.

Szathmári created a panoply of neologisms for the belief systems, cultural practices, institutions etc. of Behin society, that are thinly disguised equivalents of the same phenomena in Western civilization. Even among the Behins there are a small number of sages, prophets, wise men, sacred religious figures, founders and inspirers of religions, called bikru. Gulliver inquires of his Hin guide about the bikru. The bikru are also found wanting. A post on my other blog more extensively documents this:

Sándor Szathmári on the limitations of sages

Here I reproduce the key dialogue that pinpoints the crux of the matter (which also reminds me of why I disliked Hermann Hesse's Siddartha), boldfacing the priceless punchline:

"Don't speak of 'the' bikru. You shouldn't think that they had only one bikru. There were several. Perhaps, you, too, might have become one of them."

"Indeed?!" I looked at him flabbergasted.

"Yes. They burn every bikru first. Later they recognize him because, as you yourself have seen, they have minds but the self-radiation doesn't allow them to dominate clearly and as soon as it comes to words, to say nothing of deeds, everything becomes reversed. The bikrus, however, have the ability to manifest their intelligence but, as I have said, in their being they are Behins and they are not free of imperfections and fixed ideas."

"Of fixed ideas? What is this fixed idea?"

"To be a bikru is also in fact a monomania; the erroneous belief that with the Behins there is a connection between the heard word and the brain. A bikru is a Behin whose only Behinity is that he doesn't realize among whom he lives; for it could not be imagined, could it, that somebody who was aware of the Behinic disease would still want to explain reality to them."

Evolutionary psychology, bourgeois reason, the management of duality & the erasure of history

Evolutionary psychologists should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

I was amazed to find Christopher Badcock, writing for Psychology Today, advocating Hungarian Esperantist Sándor Szathmári's utopian/dystopian novel Voyage to Kazohinia as a prescient anticipation of Badcock's model of the diametric mind:

 "Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia" by Christopher Badcock, Psychology Today, May 6, 2017

"The ABC of the Diametric Model, Twenty Years On" by Christopher Badcock, Psychology Today, July 5, 2017

I blogged about these two posts on another of my blogs:

• Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia (2)
• Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia

In my work on Szathmári, I have emphasized that this novel embodies a basic cultural and ideological dichotomy of modern civilization in a unique fashion. Badcock in his other work manifests this awareness as well, as well as its relationship to C. P. Snow's "two cultures"--another relationship I have pursued--but he attributes the social configuration to genetic causes. Here are a couple more of Badcock's several contributions to the Psychology Today site:

Brain Imaging Reveals the Diametric Mind: Mentalizing brain areas inhibit mechanistic ones and vice versa. Posted Apr 11, 2014

Diametrically Beyond the Two Cultures: Conflict between science and humanities is rooted in cognition. Posted Aug 29, 2012

Here is a book-length continuation of his original book on the subject:

The Diametric Mind Insights into AI, IQ, the Self and Society: a sequel to The Imprinted Brain.

And here is a related essay referenced by Badcock:

Autism, Psychosis, and the “Two Cultures”: C. P. Snow Reconsidered in Light of Recent Theories about Mentalistic Cognition by Jiro Tanak

Now, the hypothesis that there is a certain structure to the human brain, if there is anything to this model, and that this would have a relationship with the historical development of human institutions, would be a major factor to take into account in understanding why certain modes of thought and behavior are so readily reinforced. But the charlatanism that constitutes a large part of evolutionary psychology obscures the mechanisms and structure of social organization in historical development and uncritically reads society directly off of genetic dispositions.

If you read Badcock's posts and other writings, you may smell something rotten as I do. Reading this sort of material is like reading a parody of the scientific method. The concrete relationship of multifactorial social complexes becomes reduced to the most simplistic schematisms built up on a naive ideological basis. Of course, the irreligionists who gobble up this fare fancy that they have found the master key to irrationality and the reason they think they embody. But this is also a symptom of social and ideological degeneration, bourgeois reason at the end of its rope.

Futurology as bourgeois ideology: from the Cold War to now (2)

In my previous post, I mentioned this book:

The Future of Society: A Critique of Modern Bourgeois Philosophical and Socio-political Conceptions, edited by Murad Saifulin. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

Completing my quick scan of the book, I concluded that it was even more bankrupt than I had imagined. The book is saturated with such grandiose propaganda, the ideological content of western futurism pales in comparison to such bombast. It is also remarkable how poor a critique of bourgeois futurology this is.

Bourgeois futurology conceals any systematic understanding of society, renders the underlying properties of capitalism invisible so that it is not even raised as a question, and projects technocratic solutions as triumphing over whatever laundry list of questions it addresses. The occlusion of social critique by the techniques of forecasting is perhaps comparable to the pseudo-scientific basis of bourgeois economics.

Yet the Soviet approach delineated in this book is concerned primarily with defending its side of the Cold War, demonstrating the superiority of its system and the inevitable victory of communism. Otherwise the Soviet vision is equally as technocratic. As the Soviet system is competing with the capitalist system almost on its own terms while disguising its own nature, its critique of bourgeois futurology must itself be truncated.

The missing prediction of the demise of the Soviet Union itself is itself a commentary on the validity of this perspective.

How different the presuppositions of an unlimited future seemed back in 1973 (though it must be noted that the energy crisis threw serious doubt into the viability of such a prospect). Here is one futuristic vision from the Soviet Union of 1973 that parallels even the current fantasies of the West. This is a section on the future colonization of outer space:

Future problems of the exploration of the Earth and outer space

Best laid plans of mice and men . . . then, and now?

Futurology as bourgeois ideology: from the Cold War to now

Imaginings about the future, whether driven by technological projection, science fiction, or questions of political and social organization, don't have a specific starting point in time. Obviously, with the massive political and scientific-technological change in the 19th century, avant-garde projections about the future became the order of the day, coinciding with the birth of real science fiction. But the century of futuristic imagination is the 20th century.

I can only speak about it personally from the standpoint of the United States. Outside of the genre of utopian/dystopian fiction, the prototypes of which mostly originated in Europe, most imaginative projections of the future I encountered growing up were technological in nature. The prospect of space exploration was part of this scenario. Naturally science fiction ran ahead of reality, but science fiction authors were also advocates of space exploration, and the prospect of eventual colonization of other planets was one futuristic scenario.

Of course the 1950s and '60s were an era in which, the dangers notwithstanding, there seemed to be unlimited vistas for the future. The Club of Rome's report on the limits of growth and the first Earth Day in 1970 rained on this parade somewhat, but could not wash it out.  We live in a very different time now: we know we're doomed, but deny it.

In the '70s I became wary of futurology as a quasi-scientific endeavor. I endured a few three-hour lectures by Buckminster Fuller, then all the rage, and I got disgusted with him. I checked out some of the literature. I remember The Futurist magazine. It became clearer to me that this intellectual discipline was highly selective in its methodology, interests, and purposes, and that it was fundamentally ideological in nature. Here is one "in" to the field:

Futures studies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One place to get a contrary perspective, with a mixture of critique and mystification, was the Soviet Union, the USA's arch-enemy. I vaguely recall seeing a title or two critical of the futurology racket. The web site leninist.biz aims to list and digitize Soviet publications in English translation. Two or three titles here are relevant.

Probably the most important, as it is cited elsewhere, is not available online, but here is the reference:

Shakhnazarov, G. K. [Georgi Khosroevich] Futurology Fiasco: A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982.

This book is available online:

The Future of Society: A Critique of Modern Bourgeois Philosophical and Socio-political Conceptions, edited by Murad Saifulin. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

This book traces ideas about the future from far back in the past. As for critique of bourgeois futurology, the entire argument is predicated on the premises of the Cold War, obsessed with the role of anti-communism in bourgeois thought. Whatever criticism of western conceptions might be fruitful is drowned in ideological propaganda for the Soviet system. Even by reasonable standards of the time this aspect of the argument is a botched batch of verbiage. But now that the Soviet Union has been extinct for two decades, the argument looks even more ridiculous. This is a shame, because there was really a critique to be had, irrespective of any apologia for the USSR.

Another book is included in this web site. The first 99 pages are supposed to be available, but the link to the PDF is not working now:

Streltsova, N[inel]. Looking into the Future. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987.

Whether there is anything of a methodological nature beyond specific forecasting for the 21st century I do not know.

While I have not researched the matter, obviously one need not be dependent on anything the Soviets produced to construct a critique. And of course now neoliberalism has conquered the world, which changes the priorities of the ideological struggle over the future. While there is no effective institutional competition for the neoliberal technocratic vision for the future, the ideological delusion of the glories of a technological future is more self-deceiving than ever.

While technologies can be imagined which well could be developed over the coming half-century, the gap between reality and the frontiers of imagination has narrowed. A telling symptom is the banality and lack of imagination in the premises of the science fiction and fantasy television and film entertainment presented to us. Thanks to the advanced technology of real life and visual production, the special effects that can now be produced are more spectacular than ever, effectively distracting from the thematic poverty and uncritical nature of what is being produced and consumed. Surface sophistication effectively occludes underlying philosophical insipidity.

The elephant in the room was always the capitalist system, a critique of which was always tacitly censored, and now globalized capitalism, even without an imminent threat of thermonuclear war, which once loomed so large (and perhaps will again), is on the verge of destroying the whole world. Of course our popular culture is full of disaster scenarios, and the environmental crisis is no secret. Still, glorious fantasies about the technological future are promulgated and eagerly lapped up by devotees of science and technology, oblivious to the inconvenient truth that bourgeois reason is at the end of its rope.

Max Horkheimer, Montaigne, & bourgeois skepticism (2)

Bildung and Critical Theory facing Post-modernity by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev

The postmodernity part and the conclusions are insufferable ("critical pedagogy" has always struck me as idiotic) but the content concerning the Frankfurt School and Bildung is interesting.

Here's the passage specifically about Montaigne:

A clear manifestation of this optimist-positive utopianism is Horkheimer's "Montaigne and the role of skepticism." From within the Marxist tradition Horkheimer here articulates the importance and weaknesses of modern, bourgeois skepticism, which is a central element of Enlightenment and the project of Bildung. Because the bourgeoisie have the upper hand, claims Horkheimer, the worth of the individual becomes mainly an economic issue and the critical Spirit becomes an individual’s aesthetic pastime. Skepticism, he claims, is targeted at saving the individual. This is its great goal. But Critical Theory, in opposition to this tradition, conceives the individual as basically dependent on social conditions and understands her emancipation as part of the liberation of humanity, coming about within an essential change in the social totality. This new society, according to the early Horkheimer, will actualize Montaigne's quest for the happy realization of the essence of the human.

It's hard to imagine an academic department more worthless than Education, "Critical Pedagogy" included, unless it's Political Science. Anyway, here's another specimen:

Adorno, Horkheimer, Critical Theory and the Possibility of a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy by Ilan Gur-Ze’ev

Horkeimer's essay on Montaigne is mentioned here, too. And here at least is a critique of Henry Giroux, his descent into postmodernism, and his misunderstanding of Marcuse (who also comes under fire) and other critical theorists. The author also recapitulates the development of the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno.

What does all this come to?

Counter-education, if true to itself, cannot be, like Critical Pedagogy wants us to believe, an attempt to implement any “theory”, as sophisticated or good-intentioned as it may be. If true to itself, counter-education must challenge any theoretical, ideological, or political "home", any master signifier, dogma, or ethnocentrism as manifestations of the Same, of the thingness in Being, which human beings are called to guard and transcend (Heidegger 196, 234). Counter-education, in this sense, must be at once Messianic and negative at any cost. This means that it cannot satisfy itself even with identification with the negation of self-evident, with the resistance to the ethnocentrism of the oppressed and cannot identify itself with the “worthier” violences they actualize against their own "internal" and "external" Others.

Ugh! I can't go on.

The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism & Society revisited

Revisiting my experiences of the 1970s (the '70s being the key to all mysteries) through the prism of the 1990s and thereafter prompted my attempt at an analytical approach that would explain the historical need, appeal, and limitations of the mysticism endemic to the most advanced black jazz musicians of the 1960s, an approach that would differ from the orientation of the burgeoning scholarship surrounding them. A few scholars of these musicians (e.g. of John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton) appreciated my endeavors, which aimed at something different from their own invaluable work. Historically, it has been necessary first to vindicate and document black cultural achievements and place them into the mainstream of intellectual life. This is an ongoing process. Yet Americans cannot follow Europeans in simply preserving cultural artifacts as museum pieces that never change while time, society, and sensibility move on, either in positive or negative directions (or both simultaneously). (The Wynton Marsalis gambit of excising the avant-garde from legitimate jazz tradition was reflected in Ken Burns' falsification of the history of jazz in the '60s and '70s, which speaks volumes about the nature of popular culture and class stratification today.) But also, the more we think about what has changed, what we lost that we couldn't save, and what we have outgrown, once the task of vindication has been accomplished, we have to evaluate where we're at now, in the process of blindly feeling our way into the future.

Recent musings about Sun Ra have diverted my attention to an old project of mine:

The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism & Society: Meaning, Method & the Young Hegelians (2002, 2004)

I have noted that one of the most striking things about some of these avant-garde jazz composers/musicians is the individualism that characterizes their construction of belief systems or esoteric/mystical conceptions. Coltrane graduated from traditional Christianity in North Carolina to eclecticism in Philadelphia, studying everything, professing tolerance of a multiplicity of paths, while developing no original system of thought. Sun Ra concocted out of his sources an Afrocentric cosmo-mythology combining an interest in ancient Egypt with interplanetary travel. Sun Ra was from Birmingham, Alabama, so it is understandable why only taking up residence on the planet Saturn could get him far enough away from the South. Anthony Braxton comes out of Chicago, constructing an original esoteric system more mathematical and abstract. There must be a way of analyzing this historical trajectory in a fashion different from both uncritical boosterism and from an overall historically and sociologically impoverished atheist/humanist movement.

I concluded the ruminations collected herein with two generalizations—the moral of the story, if you will (pardon the fancy language):

(a) Oppositional mystical/metaphysical positions are anticipations of developments to come, formulated at a time and staking out a territory before they can be concretely realized in society and developed in theoretical form. In Hegelian fashion, that which is needed but cannot become concrete must live as abstraction.

(b) When the historical moment is due for the sublation of mystical/metaphysical abstractions into scientific/cultural form, and this fails to happen, then a regression takes place, and the dark side of mysticism—intimately connected with fascism—comes out into the light, the concealed weaknesses of a cultural strategy become manifest, and the cultural strategy goes bankrupt.

"Bankrupt" is the key word for today. Neither a return to the 1950s, perpetuation of navel-gazing avant-garde noodle-doodle, nor indulgence in the pole-dancing bullshit many of you take for music today, will do. But there is something missing in thought as well as in culture, and for that neither nostalgia nor presentism will do. Our work of mourning involves living in a state of tension between present and past, and figuring out how to survive a future that is rapidly being stolen from us.

Julian Huxley revisited

Many years ago (decades, most likely) I read two of Julian Huxley's books: Religion without Revelation and Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny (formerly titled New Bottles for New Wine*). I remember mostly some remarks from the latter, in the essay "A Re-definition of Progress", that contradicted the reactionary mysticism of Julian's brother Aldous (p. 20, 34-5).

Aldous reviled "the religion of Inevitable Progress" and replaced that ideal with "unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground of being". Aldous stressed self-development rather than social transformation, characterizing self-development as a transcendental dissolution of self in the eternal Divine Ground (per Aldous' notion of The Perennial Philosophy). Julian did not go for this. Years earlier, as a teenager, I admired Aldous Huxley but later found his mysticism too repellent to accommodate. Hence I noted his brother's dissent. (Years later I wrote a rather crude critique of reactionary utopianism: Screed on the Politics of Utopianism.)

Otherwise, though my philosophy in my teenage years was pretty much congruent with Julian's liberal humanism, by the time I read his work I found it philosophically and politically behind the curve, however appreciative I was of the repudiation (albeit diplomatic) of his brother. Skipping ahead: I perused one or both of these books again four years ago, and Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny within the past two weeks, whereupon I noted Julian's philosophical laxity in defining his humanism as a religion, coupled with his repudiation of materialism. I will have more to say about this in a future post.

Some essays by Julian Huxley online:

“Transhumanism” (1957)

"The New Divinity"

"The Coming New Religion of Humanism"

And see:

Julian Huxley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

* This latter work was published in 1957. My copy was published under the new title: New York: Mentor Books, 1960.

Secularism, Utopia & the Discernment of Myth

Boer, Roland. "Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (Fall 2005).
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

Roland Boer has written a number of books and articles on Marxism and religion, and has a blog, too. More on all that later. For the moment, this article . . .

Boer seeks a way to characterize properly the free-lance sensibilities of contemporary "spiritual experience". Four issues to address are: secularism, post-structuralism, utopian possibilities of religion, and the discernment of myths (after Ernst Bloch). I'm guessing that he really meant to write post-secularism rather than post-structuralism.

Post-secularism is manifested by the pervasive practice of asserting that one is spiritual, not religious. In the utopian realm, Boer seeks a shared language of spiritual experiences that do not erase differences. Secularism and post-secularism are inseparable and dialectically related. Contrary to the settled conception of secularization now, the concept was much contested in the 19th century prior to the interventions of Max Weber and Karl Lowith. Considering alternatives to the latter two, Boer begins with Walter Benjamin (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). Boer's description of Benjamin's notion of secularization is unintelligible to me, but it has something to do with the fall of theological/historical time into spatialization and taxonomy, termed "natural history". Benjamin's work reveals that religion has been (tacitly?) equated with Christianity, and secularization effectively equals the negation of Christianity. Religion is often assumed to pertain to the supermundane, supernatural realm, though it has taken on a broader meaning as well. Boer is unclear here, but he mentions anthropological studies and studies of religions outside of Christianity (and Judaism). All the analytical tools brought to bear on non-western non-Christian belief systems are actually secular translations of the categories of Christian religion.

Boer sees something pernicious in this, apparently, but his next move is to shifts to a discussion of Adorno's critiques of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Key here is that . . .

The language of theology, appropriated by Heidegger and existentialism, has the distinct ideological role of producing patterns of subordination to an absolute authority, which became fascism rather than God and the Church. The theological language of existentialism - which drew its sacredness from the cult of authenticity rather than Christianity – becomes, for Adorno, an ideological schema particularly suited to fascism, for which it functioned not so much as an explicit statement, but as a “refuge,” a mystification that gave voice to an ostensible salvation from alienation that functioned as a virulent justification of oppression, the “smoldering evil” (Adorno 1965, 9) of fascism.

Boer equates this view to a critique of idolatry one can find in Adorno's writings. Proceeding further . . .

Secularization then becomes a process riven with contradictions, one whose rejection of Christianity relies on Christianity, and this, I would suggest, is one of the main reasons for the fact that secularization never quite seemed to succeed . . .

Boer's overall argument doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Mini-arguments here and there do, but the overall structure of the argument doesn't cohere. Here is one piece, though, that is exceptionally lucid, and socially accurate:

The flowering of the myriad forms of religious expression and experience for which the secularization hypothesis could not account is instead described in terms of spirituality, the properly post-secular religion. I don’t want to trace the Christian history of the term “spirituality,” but one of its features is that it relies upon the widespread knowledge of a whole range of religious practices that would not have been possible without the study of religions in the first place, without the endless cataloguing and study of religions from the most ancient, such as Sumeria and Babylon or pre-historic humans, to the most contemporary forms, such as the well-known Heaven’s Gate group that committed suicide, all shod with Nike shoes, when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared on earth’s horizon. Apparently emptied of doctrines to which one must adhere, or of institutions that carefully guard salvation, or of specific groups bound by language and ethnic identity, spirituality enables one to recover lost or repressed practices, such as Wicca or Yoruba sacrifice, but to pick and choose elements that seem to suit individual lifestyles or predilections. It allows one to designate the vitality of indigenous religions (which are no longer religion but spirituality), as a lost source of connectedness with the land, with nature, or other human beings. Unfortunately, however, spirituality’s private piety and devotion comes at the expense of any collective agenda. It also relies on both liberal pluralism and tolerance, as well as the profound reification of social and cultural life that is everywhere around us. You can practice your own particular spirituality in your small corner, as long you don’t bother me, we say. Like secularization, spirituality itself depends upon its own contradiction: both rely upon the religion they reject.

This is a dead-on description of all the upper middle class New Agers I've met in recent years.

Boer next shifts to a discussion of Utopia, taking off from the thought of Ernst Bloch. Again, there's a passage I can't make any sense out of:

What is often forgotten is that the hermeneutics of suspicion and recovery in political approaches such as feminism, post-colonial criticism and liberation theology owe a debt to Bloch. It seems to me that the effort to locate a shared language of “spiritual experience,” one that is sensitive to variations of social, political and cultural difference, relies upon a utopian project in the best sense(s) of the term.

One of Bloch's central insights was not only to discern utopian impulses, but to note that when they include yearning for a lost golden age, their regression has already set in. Utopianism should be future oriented.

The problem with seeking a shared language, as utopian hermeneutics does, is that religions embody mutually exclusive world views. And there is no unmediated experience. Attempts to transcend difference betray origins, as is the case with Rudolph Otto.

Once again, Boer's logic eludes me, but his next move is to seek a unifying principle in myth.

Even more than religion per se, the Enlightenment target of secularization was myth, a term that had acquired an unwieldy cluster of associations: untruth, confusion, fuzzy thinking, the ideology of oppression, and so on. Myth found itself driven from town to town, expelled by the enlightened burghers, only to retreat to the forests and deserts, the realm of Nature, where a few wayward individuals might have some use for it. Faced with the use of myth by the Nazis and other sundry fascists, with their notions of blood and soil and the Blond Beast, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno saw only the negative aspects of the term. For Benjamin, the ultimate form of myth was capitalism, as he traced in The Arcades Project (1999), and so he sought a way beyond myth, a waking from the dream, that made use of biblical motifs. Unfortunately, he remained trapped within the myth of the Bible itself. For Adorno (1999), myth was the antithesis of utopia. Myth was the realm of the unitary principle, the abolition of non-identity that is characteristic of a world dominated by men. For both Adorno and Benjamin, utopia meant the end of myth.

Boer prefers Bloch:

For Bloch, myth is neither pure false consciousness that needs to be unmasked, nor a positive force without qualification. Like ideologies, all myths, no matter how repressive, have an emancipatory-utopian dimension that cannot be separated from deception and illusion. Thus, in the very process of manipulation and domination, myth also has a moment of utopian residue, an element that opens up other possibilities at the very point of failure. Bloch is particularly interested in biblical myth, for the subversive elements in the myths that interest him are enabled by ideologies both repetitious and repressive.

Further down . . .

At his best, Bloch’s discernment of myth is an extraordinary approach, for it enables us to interpret the myths of any religion or spirituality as neither completely reprehensible nor utterly beneficial. That is to say, it is precisely through and because of the myths of dominance and despotism that those of cunning and non-conformism can exist. It is not merely that we cannot understand the latter without the former, but that the former enables the latter.

Two examples from the Bible are given, the first concerning Eden, the second, death.

In the end, then, the value of religions like Christianity is that they have tapped into this utopian desire for something beyond death. Their mistake for Bloch is that they want to say something definite about death. But that something is hardly definite: it is mythology, and for that we need a discerning eye that can see both the liberating and repressive features of those myths.

I find Boer's conclusion most unsatisfactory and downright irritating:

If we follow through the dialectical relationship between secularism and post-secularism - a contradictory logic in which secularism turns out to rely on the Christianity it everywhere denies, a logic that appears starkly in a post-secularism that cannot be thought without secularism - then myth turns out to be the most urgent religious or spiritual question for us. Rather than the problem-ridden term “spirituality”, I have argued that Bloch’s hermeneutics of the discernment of myth provides not only a productive method, but also an approach to the utopian desire that lies behind any effort to find a shared “religious” or “spiritual” language. Such a language needs to be both critical and appreciative, for myths work in an extremely cunning fashion. It is a process that enables on the one hand the identification of those myths, or even elements within a myth, that are oppressive, misogynist, racist, that serve a ruling elite, and on the other, those which are subversive, liberating and properly socialist or even democratic ­ in other words, utopian.

I have a number of objections here, beginning with another instance of a chronic lack of logical clarity. How does Jewish secularism rely on Christianity? Or Indian, or Japanese? Suppose one rejects post-secular ideologies: New Age spirituality, etc.? Then how is myth the most urgent spiritual question, other than to neutralize it? Why should there be a spiritual language at all, shared or not? Why should anything subversive, liberating, or socialist be seen in mythical expressions in the 21st century? There's not an atom of it that is progressive in any way. Myth can only be productively scavenged retrospectively, by those not under its grip. Myth in any form is not adequate to the comprehension of contemporary society. Considering the problem more widely, popular symbology simply can't encapsulate the truth content of the state of our society at this time. Indeed, after the waning of the various countercultures of the 1950s-70s, I see nothing left for popular mythology to do. The good intentions of the past need to be salvaged as well as criticized for their naivete. (I've addressed this with respect to the individual mysticisms of avant-garde jazz musicians.) What myth is alive today needs to be killed off and dissected. In any case, Boer should be more clear and specific about what he's after.

Roland Boer on Marxism & Religion (1)

I've recently discovered Roland Boer, who has written several books and articles on Marxism, politics, myth, and theology. He also has a blog:

Stalin's Moustache
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/

One blog entry to check out:

Marxism and Religion: A Brief Guide
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/02/marxism-and-religion-b...

See also:

Criticism of Religion
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/01/criticism-of-religion....

Boer has a 5-volume series on Marxism and religion, titled Criticism of Heaven and Earth: On Marxism and Theology. Here he mentions some figures he writes about:

Lucien Goldmann
Fredric Jameson
Rosa Luxemburg
Karl Kautsky
Julia Kristeva
Alain Badiou
Giorgio Agamben
Georg Lukacs
Raymond Williams

Other blog entries of interest:

Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-earth-on-...

Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of a Biblical Theme
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-wrote-most-of-politi...

. . . to which I've added a comment.

Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/political-grace-revolu...

Choice Biblical Morsels from Marx and Co.
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/choice-biblical-morsel...

A Communist Confession of Faith (while we wait for further news on NT Wrong)
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/communist-confession-o...

. . . with comment from me.

Of Boer's articles online, to date I've reported on:

"Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth"
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg"
http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Boer.pdf

The next article up for review is:

"Terry Eagleton and the Vicissitudes of Christology," Cultural Logic, 2005.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/boer.html

. . . and there are more to be discussed.

Christ the Vampire & other ghoulish goodies

Let's begin with the publisher in question, III Publishing. This site maintains a blog. There are several categories of essays on the site, for example, Religion: A Guide for the Perplexed (further subcategorized). This outfit maintains a booklist, but one might as well go directly to the book descriptions, with links to sample texts.

The press itself appears to be an anarchist press, but my disrespect for anarchism notwithstanding, there is amusing material here.

The first book I read from this publisher and from this author (several years ago) was:

The Last Days of Christ the Vampire by J. G. Eccarius.

This novel "is set in Providence, Rhode Island, where a small group of people discovers that Jesus really Lives, he rose from the dead and controls the Catholic Church and Protestant sects as well. It's an action-packed battle against the ancient vampire."

I don't remember much about this, but it was highly entertaining. See the sample.

By the same author, I also have:

Resurrection 2027. Sample.

"J.G. Eccarius is back with this science-fiction look at a theocracy governing what's left of the human race. God is a woman, her representatives are women, and yet Ann Swanson, a teenage woman, begins to feel plenty oppressed in Resurrection City. Is she really a resurrected nurse from the late 20th century? Or is the entire society a fabric of lies?"

As you can see, J. G. Eccarius and III Publishing have some offbeat material to offer.

I also have a dystopian novel that is out of print:

A.D. by Saab Lofton

"In a few years the White Aryan Resistance and the Nation of Islam will divide America into racist regimes. Saab Lofton's A.D. starts with a look at one man's life under Farrakhan's regime, then dives centuries into the future to look at a Libertarian Socialist Democracy, Saab's vision of Utopia."

sample from A.D.
Review of A.D. by Darius James
Practical Anarchy review

Given the topic, this is of greater significance than the other two, which may be why it's sold out.

I see some other books with religious, mythological, or cosmological themes have appeared since I last checked out this publisher:

Pyrexia by Michel Mery
Vampires or Gods? by William Meyers