Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 02:15:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: CULTURAL IMPASSE & THE CHANGING FORMS OF IDEALITY(1)


"Why the popularity of the Western?  Because young people who sit cramped in
buses and tied to assembly lines terribly wish they could be elsewhere....
Like all art, but more than most, the movies are not merely a reflection,
but an extension of the actual -- an extension along the lines which people
feel are lacking and possible in the actual.  That, my dear, is the complete
secret of Hegelian dialectic.  The two, the actual and the potential, are
always inseparably linked; one is always giving way to the other.  At a
certain stage a crisis takes place and a complete change is the result."  

[from letter to Constance Webb, September 1, 1943, in: THE C.L.R. JAMES
READER, edited by Anna Grimshaw; Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; p. 129]

There are a few themes that have been vaguely circulating in 
my head lately, foggy though it's become.  One has to do with cultural 
form as ideality and its relation to the actual materiality of 
social living.  Another has to do with CLR James--that one 
has to exercise one's imagination to appreciate that James was the 
product of a generation radically different from our own time and 
that this explains both him and the differences in the applicability 
of his ideas then and now.  A third has to do with my total disgust 
at contemporary culture and the fact that all of my cultural reference
points come from a reality that has ceased to be, and hence I've got 
to think my way through this without succumbing to decadence or 
becoming nostalgic about the rotten past.

James is only one example out of a limitless multitude, but he for 
example lived in a very different time from 
our own, a time much more backward and less self-aware, and 
therefore the expectations one had and the judgments one could make 
about human actuality and possibility took place in a different 
mental universe from the one we now inhabit.  (This is comparable to 
my co-worker's statement that James lived in a world radically different 
from that of the New Left and hence should not be viewed as a New 
Leftist who just happened to be active in the 1940s.)  And of course in 
those days the realization among the progressive intelligentsia across the 
board that the future of humanity lay in the masses and so their lives 
and aspirations should be give attention at long last, accompanied by 
the research and documentation on folk culture, working class life, etc.
Without getting to details, the point being that one's basic approach to
actuality and ideality is of a certain character, and then is not now.  

I also reflect from my own experience on how different society and 
culture are now than they were 30 years ago.  By the commonplaces of 
today's cynical sophistication, the likes of Lenny Bruce and Allen 
Ginsberg seem awfully quaint and even antiquarian.  You couldn't pay
me enough to relive my childhood, but I am fascinated by the culture 
I grew up on, and I think of the meaning of TV shows such as The 
Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and The Fugitive, their conceptual 
universe and their relation as cultural ideality to the social reality
that generated them. 
 
My one theme I find it difficult to clarify is this 
relationship between materiality and ideality as it affects 
the conception of the masses, as that requires a great 
effort to formulate in detail.  Probably people were a lot 
worse 50 years ago even than they are now (heaven help us!), but 
circumstances have evolved to the point where all the flaws from the 
both the material and ideal angles become revealed in a way that requires
our analysis be moved up several notches.  One would think that 
all the new scholarship that has come out in the past 20 years 
would have solved this problem, but I contend that the very 
division of labor has dissipated much of this energy in a great 
deal of dishonesty and confusion.  It takes little no effort or risk now  
to analyze the naive past in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, 
etc.-- i.e. considerations that are commonplace now and are used half-
consciously by academics who never lifted a finger to change the realities
that have made the consciousness of these matters a social commonplace.
In other words, superficially we are conscious of so much more and can 
apply this knowledge to the past, but I believe the overwhelming quantity
of this kind of analysis is smug and shallow, and the postmodern diversion 
of intellectual energy represents both a world historical impasse and the
extreme alienation instigated by the division of labor.

I'm throwing around terms like materiality and ideality: what do I mean?
Well, I have pilfered the concept of the ideal from the Soviet philosophical 
literature (I'm sure Jukka is familiar with this), and have extended it to 
cover cultural phenomena abstracted from the material conditions from which
they are derived.  I may be violating the strict meaning of ideality in some
of my applications, but I will explain the rationale for doing so shortly.
The ideal means simply the intangible products of mental and social
activity--thought, ideas, concepts, information.  Unlike the physicalism
characteristic of certain western approaches to the mind-body problem,
Soviet dialectical materialism, following Lenin, insisted on the opposition
between the material and the ideal, rather than their identity (i.e. a
thought is this chemical or that group of neurons firing).  (One example of
the literature: THE PROBLEM OF THE IDEAL by David Dubrovsky.)

Clearly, cultural ideas circulating in society would come under the realm of
the ideal.  But I don't know about "cultural products" , as so many of them
are stubbornly material practices.  Chinese cuisine, African music, or
European ballet are all extremely tangible and physical activities or
entities, but I want to group them with ideality for two reasons.  Their
stylistic, aesthetic, and organizational properties can be abstracted out of
the physical activity and material culture and produce them (food
preparation->recipes, music and dance-> styles and principles of
organization, etc.).  Secondly, from an everyday social standpoint we are
quite accustomed to abstracting out the unique creative and expressive
properties of various social groups and calling these things "culture."
When you go to an ethnic festival, you want to sample the food, listen to
the music, watch the dance, check out the clothes, etc., but you if you have
any sanity you could care less about the family structure, child-rearing
practices, the economic and technological infrastructure (beyond specific
tools of the trade) supporting these activities or the other routine
commonplaces that make everyday life so unspeakably tedious.  When you see
"culture", it's show-time, and this is what I mean by ideal.  It is the
realm where people express themselves, their creativity, their aspirations,
even their utopian ideals.

However, to understand these things, one has to set them against the
materially existing life from which they originate.  A fortiori for what we
now like to call "culture": literature, movies, CDs, TV shows, etc.

To understand what "culture" means now in relation to the reality we live 
and what it was then in relation to that living reality, this is my task,
esp. with respect to the need to understand the particular configuration of
the utter rottenness of both the materiality and the ideality of the world
we live in now.