Sunday, January 8, 2017

MACROS AND PC'S

As promised, here is the first of a number of essays I wrote many years ago [this one never published] which I think are worth presenting to the world.

Macros and PC's:
A Last-Ditch Attempt to Salvage Ideological Critique
by
Robert Paul Wolff

[Editorial note:  this was written thirty years ago.  Now, of course, I use WORD]

            I am one of those dinosaurs who still use Wordstar as a word processing program. In
the Wordstar program there is a utility that permits a user to define a macro - that is to say, a series of characters associated with a single one or two stroke command. When I have finished writing a letter, for example, I simply press "Escape-C." On the screen appears "tab, tab, tab, Sincerely yours, comma, return, return, return, tab, tab, tab, Robert Paul Wolff." Another macro command prints out "tab, tab, tab, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy," and yet a third produces "tab, tab, tab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst."  This Macro utility is a great convenience to me. It permits me to produce a standardized bit of text without mistakes and without much thought. I have ten or twelve such macros stored somewhere in the Wordstar program.

I often think that George Orwell would have been quite delighted by the phenomenon of the macro, had he lived long enough to see it. In his great essay, "Politics and the English Language," written in 1946, Orwell, you will recall, talks about the corruption of political thought and language that is manifested in the mindless repetition of standardized phrases. He gives lots of examples, such as "a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind," and "bloodstained tyranny," and "achieve a radical transformation," and "leaves much to be desired." Had he written the essay only a few years later, he could have added "the free world," and "communist dictatorship," and perhaps "tax and spend liberal." He would have enjoyed the idea of politicians - or their speech writers - programming these and other phrases into their computers as macros, so that they could be produced by a single keystroke or two with no thought whatsoever. We Kant scholars have some rather specialist cant phrases for which macros might be appropriate - my favorite is "conditions of the possibility of experience in general."

These reflections were prompted, several semesters ago, by an incident in a seminar I was teaching on ideological critique. The participants were a group of extremely intelligent and widely read graduate students - all impeccably radical. Despite my heroic efforts to focus their attention on particular, concrete examples, such as the controversy that has developed among ethnographers of the northern Kalahari desert, the students persisted in speaking and writing in the most suffocatingly abstract and stereotypical fashion. Things finally blew up when one member of the class, making a class presentation, referred in passing to "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." The phrase rolled off his tongue as though the individual words were simply syllables of one great polysyllable - stuck together by some sort of syntactical glue. Everyone in the class was quite comfortable with the phrase. It seemed to me that they found it reassuring, rather in the way little children snuggle down in bed when they hear "Once upon a time." All except a rather abrasive German student who interrupted to protest that she, for one, had nothing against classism.  Indeed, she said, she regularly judged people according to their economic class, and thought it quite the right way to go about things.  The class came to a dead halt, and no one knew what to say. None of the students had ever heard anyone question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," used as a term of opprobrium. It was as though, in the middle of a class preparing little Catholic boys and girls for First Communion, a smart-mouthed trouble maker had piped up and said, "I can take the Father and the Son, but you can keep the Holy Ghost."

            I pounced on the intervention - as the French have taught us to call it when a student
says something in class - and did everything I could to make it the occasion for a searching
examination of unacknowledged ideological presuppositions. That was, after all, the subject
matter of the course. But it was a total flop. I simply couldn't get the students to see how mind-numbingly banal, how drained of all genuine thought, that phrase had become. I could not even get them to attune their ears to the ugliness of it as language.  Freud says somewhere, talking about the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy, that if there is a single topic that it is not permitted to examine in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that topic. I have always found this a profound insight into what happens in the classroom as well.  A classroom in which it is socially or pedagogically unacceptable to question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is a classroom in which neither real teaching nor real learning can take place. It is like a classroom at a Catholic university in which teachers are free to explore every conceivable subject - except the legitimacy of abortion. It is like the huge introduction to neo-classical economics at Harvard, presided over by former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors Martin Feldstein, who announced, when he returned from his duties in Washington, that the purpose of the course was to teach that the market works - not how it works, mind you, but that it works. 

            There are a number of ways in which an orthodoxy can be imposed on a classroom.  The most obvious, and hence the least dangerous, is by administrative fiat. Considerably more dangerous, because harder to spot and to confront, is the quiet, tacit social pressure that enshrines certain ways of thinking as correct, stigmatizing deviations as morally reprehensible and unworthy of serious consideration. I have come to think of this as macro-thinking. By one of the ironies of modern discourse, this pre-programming of thought masquerades as ideological critique, when in fact it is the precise opposite. 

            Ideological critique is the demonstration that a putatively value-neutral and objective description of the world actually conceals a thoroughly interested distortion of reality in the service of some powerful social or economic group. As Karl Mannheim shows us in Ideology and Utopia, the critique of a text as ideological is a hostile and aggressive attempt not merely to refute the thesis advanced by the text but also to discredit the author of the text as dishonest, disingenuous, covertly exploitative and manipulative. In the polite world of intellectual combat, where ink rather than blood is spilled, the accusation of ideology is the verbal equivalent of a shotgun blast. Deployed by the weak against the strong, it can be an equalizer, righting somewhat the force imbalance that characterizes unjust societies. 

Ever since Karl Marx introduced it in his early essay, "On The Jewish Question," ideological critique has been the rhetorical weapon of choice of the left. Marx himself went on, in his mature writings, to expose the covert interests at the heart of classical economic theory, managing, in Capital, to discover ideological bias even in the mathematics of Smith, Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and their fellow rationalizers of capitalism. When I was young, I was awed by the depth with which left critics could penetrate the surface of social and economic relations to expose the exploitation, inequality, privilege, and self-justification that lay beneath. By comparison, even the most superficially quick-witted and mathematically adept apologists for capitalism were shallow, one dimensional, and utterly lacking in self-awareness.

            Now, to my dismay, I find that those with whom I am allied on the left all too often
exhibit precisely these defects of intellect, insight, self-understanding, and language.  In high school Biology, we studied the autonomic nervous system by means of a particularly brutal bit of by-play with frogs. It seems that if you stick a sharp pointed object into a frog's eye and grind it around until the frog's brain is utterly destroyed, certain of its reflex responses continue to function. This is called "pithing" a frog. After the frog has been pithed, you can produce a contraction of the frog's leg by dropping a bit of acid on it. The response shows that the contraction of the leg is governed by the autonomic nervous system, centered, as I recall, in the spinal column somewhere, rather than in the brain. When I listen to speakers putatively on the left these days, I sometimes think they have been pithed, and that their speech is actually a function of their autonomic nervous system.

            I hope no one will be so foolish as to suppose that these remarks constitute a brief for right-wing discourse. Anyone who listens for even a short while to the mindless repetition of incantations to free markets, democracy, and the dangers of political extremism - by which is meant anything even slightly to the left of Bill Clinton - will know that ideological rationalizations of the established order are alive, well, and awaiting a devastating ideological
critique. But that critique cannot possibly be mounted by those who have lost all sensitivity
to the ritual and unreflective character of their own discourse.  One of the lessons Marx teaches us in Capital is that when we wish to anatomize some practice or social formation with which we are confronted, it is invaluable to remind ourselves of its history. In an effort to understand, and thereby perhaps to counteract, the triviality and shallowness of so much contemporary left discourse, I shall try in a very few words to recapitulate the sequence of steps by which, like the powerful wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Marx has been reduced from a world-shattering necromancer to a sideshow conjuror doing cheap dialectical tricks to scare intellectual children.

            The central fact of social life is the appropriation, by a ruling class, of a surplus of goods they have not produced, both for their own enjoyment and in order to reinforce their ability to continue the appropriation. This appropriation takes many institutional forms - kingship, slavery, conquest, taxation, serfdom - but always it is backed by force, and always it consists in the taking by one group of men and women of the food, clothing, shelter, and other goods that the labor of another group of men and women has produced. In a capitalist economy, appropriation takes the specific form of the exploitation of legally free wage labor by capital.  The unequal allocation of the social product is immediately obvious to anyone with eyes to see: some people live in hovels, others in castles, or condominiums. Some people eat rice and beans, others eat meat and fish. Some die unattended of diseases that medicine can cure, others are ushered out of this life as comfortably as armies of doctors and nurses can manage.

            Contrary to the mythology of celebratory historiography, those whose labor is being
appropriated almost always know perfectly well what is happening to them, even in that most mystified of all social formations, capitalism. But the rationalizations by which rulers justify their appropriations do, nevertheless, play some role in sustaining the structure of inequality. The task of ideological critique is to expose the self-interest that lurks below the surface of those rationalizations, and in that way to cripple the rationalizers. So it is that Marx devoted endless pages to attacks on the major and minor theorists of classical political economy, even though he believed that the assault on the central keep of the capitalist fortress would be led by organized workers, not their allies from the left intelligentsia. In the early part of this century, it was still possible to hope that the working class of the industrialized world would replace capitalist irrationality and injustice with the rationality and justice of socialism, but three world-historical events - the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Great Depression - put paid to that happy optimism. The willingness of the several national components of the international working class to take up arms against one another, the appearance of a pre-capitalist dictatorship masquerading as socialism, and the success of capitalism in surviving the great crash that Marx had predicted, together sank the hopes that had buoyed the early revolutionary movement.

            In response to these reverses and disappointments, radical intellectuals elaborated ever more subtle theories of hegemony, ideology, mass communication, and the mysteries of  discourse, all in a desperate attempt to explain why their generous offers of leadership elicited so few followers.  Eventually, the discourse of radicals lost all relation to the material base of social
theory, to the fundamental facts of exploitation, appropriation, and inequality, so that we were left with an empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution into which literary and aesthetic concerns could be poured. In the wonderful phrase of Alexander Pope, referring in the Dunciad to his rivals among the Augustan poets, the discourses of our contemporary radicals have become "shit to airy fineness spun."

            With no conception of the material basis of exploitation and inequality, with no way of making that fundamental distinction between appearance and reality on which all true ideological critique rests, the invocation of such phrases as "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is little more than a shibboleth, a test of politically correct pronunciation, passage of which admits one to a clique of uncritically one-dimensional flatlanders. The subject of these remarks is power and discourse - not how to control the power of discourse, or undermine the power of discourse, or apologize for the power of discourse, but how to recover the power of radical discourse, to make such discourse once again a weapon in the struggle against inequality and exploitation.

            The prerequisite to that recovery, I suggest, is a refusal to invoke the macros of speech without thought. "Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is to the 1990's what "running dogs of imperialism" and "capitalist lackeys" were to the 1930's. Now, there really were, in the 30's, nasty, unprincipled underlings who did the dirty work of the imperial capitalist nations, just as there are today. When first coined, the metaphors "running dogs" and "lackeys" captured rather vividly both the function and the moral degradation of those despicable people [assuming, for the moment, that one accepts the rather unjustifiably negative view of the dog.] But after endless, and eventually mindless, repetition, they lost their capacity to enlighten, and instead became obstacles to thought.

            In like manner, racism is an integral component of American society, sexism is a structural feature of almost all societies, disdain for the poor [which, I assume, is what is 'meant by "classism"] has been endemic among the wealthy and privileged of European and American society for centuries, and homophobia is manifestly a widespread pathology. But "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," like so many other unreflective utterances of the putatively progressive, is an impediment to thought, not a tool of ideological critique. It is as devoid of critical content as that right-wing oxymoron, "the free market."

            Perhaps this is merely the crotchety complaint of a sixty-year old radical who finds that, as usual, the young are listening to a different music and singing a different song. But I am convinced that we have never had a greater need for the destructive unmasking of entrenched
and rationalized interests, for ideological critique as Marx first conceived and practiced it. Perhaps the next generation of PC's will come with a resident program that responds to stereotyped, one-dimensional language with the error message, "Warning: words without meaning; please pause and reflect."


13 comments:

  1. First of all, the joke about accepting the Father and the Son, but rejecting the Holy Ghost made me laugh, really laugh, which doesn't happen so often these days, so thanks.

    Second, isn't it better that the mass of people repeat their rejection to sexism, racism, homophobia and classism (and ableism and transphobia) without thinking than that they don't? I assume that most people are not going to reflect much about their behavior and that they need some simple guide-lines to navigate the world, such as the above rejection of sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism and transphobia.

    Third, what is sad is when one finds trained philosophers (I'm not one) repeating the same litany without reflection and that occurs all too often.

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  2. @wallerstein

    The problem with unthinking rejection is that it is often mere tribalism, where people project their own concerns on those concepts and blame the other. So you see rejections of sexism which put all blame on one gender. Rejections of racism which blame one race. Rejections of homophobia which blame one sexual orientation. So the rejection becomes what it is supposed to reject.

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  3. Aapje,

    Simple rules never work perfectly. "Don't lie" has a lot of exceptions, as does
    "honor your father and mother" as does "offer your seat on the subway to pregnant women and the elderly". However, we teach young people those simple rules because most people function with simple rules and don't think much about them. In general, society works better if people have the rule "don't lie" in their head or even in their superego.

    Now if people are willing to discuss ethical rules calmly and rationally (which is often not the case), great. That's one of the opportunities this blog offers and I would not be here if I did not only enjoy, but also feel compelled to discuss ethical rules rationally.

    So maybe you could be a bit more specific about what you mean by "the rejection becomes what is it supposed to reject".

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  4. @Wallerstein

    Well, there are some people who argue that all white people are conditioned to be racist and that people of color cannot be racist. I consider such beliefs to be racist (and not based on solid scientific evidence).

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  5. It seems that if by "racism" we mean forming erroneous beliefs about others based on their skin color, anyone, whatever their skin color, can be racist.

    However, there is an asymmetric power relation between whites and blacks in almost all Western societies and so white racism towards blacks has had and has serious, negative consequences that black racism towards whites did not and does not have.

    Thus, white racism towards blacks is a serious social problem, while black racism towards whites, while based on erroneous beliefs, is not a serious social problem.

    However, it is probably the case that many people who study racism would not accept my definition given above in the first paragraph and would argue that racism implies an asymmetrical power relationship between the two parties involved.

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  7. Do you mean to say that the Left (or, more precisely, the New Left) in the 1990s had become focused on "identity politics" at the expense of ignoring economic injustice, and that this was a shame since it caused us to overlook the capitalist plunder that was taking place under our noses, and which was, and continues to be, the root cause of societal misery? If yes, then I'm mostly in agreement. We need a Left that is engaged in electoral politics and in things like union advocacy. Inasmuch as that Old Left model seems to be returning in avatars like Bernie Sanders, it's a happy development.

    But still, I want to ask, Can't we have both? A few years back, when producers of the film "Straight Outta Compton" were in the casting phase, a document was leaked that pertained to the kind of extras they were looking for. The film, you recall, was a depiction of the excesses of the "rap-star lifestyle," and this document stated that for the roles of "high quality" females, they wanted girls who had model good-looks and who were white, Asian, Latina, or light-skinned black. For the roles of "low quality" females (the "ghetto" types) they wanted dark-skinned black girls. Now this is straightforward racism, and I don't see how our calling it out as such should or must be linked to a critique of capitalist exploitation (though I could be wrong). What's more, a writer for the Daily Show, a black male, actually defended the racist casting on Twitter, insisting that it wasn't in fact racist at all! Clearly this person was in the grip of a fals-consciousness about race. Couldn't he have benefited from someone showing him how his rationalization were false assertions meant to shore up (racist) institutions of power?

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  8. @wallerstein

    You may consider the shooting of white cops in Dallas to be "not a serious social problem." You may consider it harmless that at BLM rallies, many revere a cop-killer (Assata Shakur). You may consider a PoC who refuse to go for opportunities, because doing so would make them 'white,' to be "not a serious social problem." You may consider an inflated sense of how much abuse there is by white people against PoC to be "not a serious social problem." I disagree.

    And these are all based on racism by PoC against white people. This problem cannot be solved with a (literal) black/white view.

    Many on the left excused the communist atrocities in the past, because of their dogma that capitalists had the upper hand in an "asymmetrical power relationship". Millions of deaths later, it should be clear that it is bad to demonize one group and idealize another. It's not good to keep making the same mistake again and again.

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  9. The intentional homicide of any human being is a serious crime and should be treated as such. However, Wikipedia tells me that until the 2016 Dallas case, no police officer in the U.S. had been deliberately targeted and killed (that figure does not include police killed while trying to apprehend suspects or criminals) since 2009.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

    If a crime occurs every 7 years, it is not a social problem. For something to be a social problem it has to occur with a certain frequency.

    According to the BBC, the felonious deaths of police officers has been declining since 1970 and has averaged 49.6 officers yearly during the last 10 years.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

    Police work is a dangerous occuption and police officers should be duly protected. I live in Chile and police officers routinely use bullet-proof vests here. I do not know if that is the case in the U.S., but if not, it would be a good idea.

    Those who defend Assata Shakur believe that she is innocent. They do not "revere her a a cop-killer" as you claim. I have no idea whether she is guilty or innocent and do not have time to study the details of the case.

    No one who I know idealizes one group and demonizes another. That racism is the case does not mean that all victims of racism are good people (what Bertrand Russell calls the "fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed"), merely that racism is evil as are all forms of oppression and dominated and should be combated.




















































    http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36826297

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  10. @wallerstein

    You are quite mistaken. The 2009 shooting was just a record that was superseded by the Dallas shooting. For example, in 2015, 41 officers were feloniously killed, including 4 in ambushes and 3 in unprovoked attacks.

    I also consider it extremely noxious that you don't consider it a social problem when hateful beliefs become more widely spread, as long as it results in fewer murders than your arbitrary threshold (murder is also not the only consequence, just the most awful and visible).

    As for Assata Shakur, regardless of whether she personally murdered anyone, she was a member of a militant organization that did. I also suggest you read the statement from which the BLM chant was taken, in which she doesn't object to murder at all, but instead states: "We must gain our liberation by any means necessary."
    http://www.assatashakur.org/mypeople.htm

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  11. I read Assata Shakur's manifest and I don't see anything racist about it.

    It is full of the rhetoric of the extreme left of the early 1970's and it all seems both dated and misguided from a perspective of almost 45 years later. I find it extremely simplistic, but she makes some valid points.

    However, we are discussing the subject of what you call black racism against whites, not strategies for black liberation and I don't see where she refers negatively to white people per se.

    She states, as you point out, that blacks must gain their liberation by any means necessary and while I would disagree with that since not all means are justifiable, I don't see anything racist about that affirmation.

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  12. @wallerstein

    The context of "any means necessary" in the statement is the crimes committed by the BLA, of which she admits she was a member, which includes specifically murdering white police officers. She wrote it in prison while awaiting her appeal and of course wasn't going to jeopardize that by explicitly admitting to hate crimes.

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  13. Now you're writing imaginative fiction. The only evidence about her state of mind we have is her manifest and that is not racist. We have no idea what her "real" motives were and are.

    You have not shown that there is a substantial social problem of black racism against whites in the U.S. The Black Liberation Army worked with members of the white far left (1981 Brinks robbery) and thus, were not anti-white per se. They killed white police officers because almost all police officers were white in the 1970's and they saw the police as their enemy, as violently enforcing the racist capitalist system. To avoid misunderstandings, I will repeat that I do not endorse the political strategy of the Black Liberation Army nor do I justify it politically or ethically.

    When one thinks about the black experience in the U.S., slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, being excluded from voting, police brutality, ghetto neighborhoods, the fact that there is not more black anti-white racism is a tribute to the generosity of black people in general and to the leadership of people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin during the civil rights movement.

    I feel that this conversation is going nowhere, so this is my last comment on the subject. Reply if you wish, of course, but unless the tone of this conversation changes, I'll not reply to your reply. Best wishes.

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