Freedom and Fetishism
by Marshall Berman

There is a certain paradoxicality at the heart of Marx’s whole enterprise. Sometimes he understands freedom not as a value but as a fact, not as something men ought to pursue but as something they cannot avoid — a synthetic a priori truth about human action, a liberty to which (in Sartre’s phrase) man is condemned. At other times, however, he regards freedom as an achievement: a difficult feat that is possible only after such “labour of the negative”(Hegel) — a labour of liberating oneself from the illusions of the particular “illusory community” that surrounds one, of getting out (as Wittgenstein put it) of the fly-bottle one finds oneself inside. When he describes capitalist society, Marx is constantly making the point that everything in it is under “illusions of the epoch,” is dominated by “fetishism,” and hence is unfree — except, of course, for the “fully conscious” revolutionary group. “As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand” (Capital, 681). The freedom Marx has given with one hand he seems to be taking back with the other: everywhere he looks, everyone seems to be in chains. Yet if men are “free,” how is it possible for them to have got into such a state of “unfreedom” in the first place? Or, alternately, if men are encased in a fly-bottle, how will it be possible for them to see things in any way but through a glass, darkly? If their whole outlook on life is “fetishistic,” how will it be possible even to recognise that they are enslaved, let alone make the effort to set themselves free? The paradox here is the familiar paradox of self-deception. Who, exactly, is supposed to be doing the “deceiving”? if the subject himself, in what sense is it meaningful to say that he is actually “deceived”? If it is meaningful, how, once having succeeded, can he undo the job, and “undeceive” himself? These are perennial problems for a therapist, not to mention a philosopher; they are also central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an “infantile disease,” he might have said, of man, who with its passing was “coming into his own."

posted by neel master at 2:36 AM

Modernist Anti-Modernism
by Marshall Berman

After more than 200 years, the anti-Enlightenment argument has become, ironically, one of the great modern traditions. Can we imagine modern culture without it? It has a protean capacity to adapt itself to every modern situation, and to reshape itself according to what issues are on any modern generation's mind: class struggle, economic depression, world war, cosmic entropy, nuclear terror. One of its most recent incarnations is eco-catastrophy, which goes something like this: modern men have destroyed their environment - ripped apart the earth, poisoned the water and air, created genocidal fire - out of an insatiable desire for development. Why have we done this? Because we are out of harmony with the cosmos. In place of development, what we need is devolution. To head off ecological annihilation, we must return to our father's house, get back to where we once belonged. We must forsake secular humanism, and embrace a fundamentally religious ontology, a world perspective that wilt wipe out man's delusions of cosmic sovereignty, and reveal him, in Heidegger's image, "not as the lord of beings but as the shepherd of Being." If we can learn to see life in this religio-pastoral way, the vision will empower us to let the world, and ourselves in it, just be.

What is perhaps the most bothersome about this proposal, I think, is its blatant bad faith. It denies its own debt to the Enlightenment and its own essential modernity. It won't admit that it is appealing to a human will to power: it assumes that human survival and happiness on earth really matter, and that people have the capacity to decide the best way to live, and to change themselves and the world to carry their decision through.It makes prophecies that claim to have empirical validity - e.g., our environment will deteriorate if people do A, but it will regenerate and thrive if they do B instead - claims that, at least in part, can be tested and verified or disproved in profane history. It claims to be archaic and primeval in its outlook, but in fact it wants us to go through a typically modern process of pragmatic reflection and then to decide in its favor because it offers us the best real deal we can get for life on earth.

posted by neel master at 2:32 AM

The Blue Notes of a Black Modernist
a review of The Amazing Bud Powell

The bebop era took a large toll on its performers. Most famously there was heroin, which swept through the jazz community robbing the world of among others, Fats Navarro, the trumpeter on the quintet date, who died only months after these recordings. Powell's demons came in the formidable, tri-headed monster of alcohol, mental illness and, crucially, racism. The young pianist had already been marked out as "sensitive" and "highly strung" by the time of his first famous gig, with Cootie Williams and Eddie Vinson. Williams, not known as a sentimentalist, recognising a certain unworldliness took it on himself to protect the youngster in an almost fatherly way. Not so the Philadelphia police, whose brutal beatings in a 1945 incident left Powell with serious headaches for years afterwards and undoubtedly hastened the first of many breakdowns. By the time of these Bluenote sessions, Powell, still only 24, had undergone long stays in hospital and the excessive use of electric shock treatment, then in vogue. A black man in the hands of state psychiatric "care" in the 1940s was more guinea-pig/prisoner than patient. Powell's experiences were probably no worse than those of many whose stories are yet to be told. His own story is grim enough.

Yet those wishing to read tragedy into every note will search in vain on the quintet pieces. Exuberance is the order of the day.

posted by neel master at 4:50 PM

It's come to be the eve of a problem set due date, and it's also come to be that I have completed about 10% of this problem set, and it shall therefore come to be that I spend an awful lot of time blogging today instead of working my problem set. After two years of anti-foundational liberal education, I think I've learned to I hate problems that have answers.

So we seem to have picked up a regular reader or two here at Goffmania; that's very encouraging. You all should check out this weblog Eclogues that I've recently discovered. It appears that its author is a graduate student or something, and she seems nice enough. She posted a very interesting entry today about a Canadian project which utilizes a grain silo to make music. How? you ask? Well, that's a very difficult question for me to answer, because the website is in french and I don't speak french. Google does an awkward translation of the 'about' page. If you want to know more, I suggest looking at the more comprehensive entry at Eclogues (linked above.)
posted by neel master at 4:41 PM